With reconstruction stalled, Gazans shelter in buildings at risk of collapse

In her Gaza City apartment, Heba Arafat walks uphill across a living room slanted at a steep angle after Israeli airstrikes caused the building’s foundations to collapse, leaving the entire structure tilted. Like thousands of people in Gaza, Arafat chose to risk living in an apartment building damaged during nearly three years of Israel’s military actions, with countless Israeli airstrikes on the Palestinian territory. “We were forced to live here because we had nowhere else to go. All of our homes were destroyed, our land was razed and we have nothing left,” said Arafat, 47. People walk at a site destroyed during the Israeli offensive, in Beit Lahiya, in the northern Gaza Strip, on August 18, 2026.

— Reuters According to the UN, 84 per cent of all structures in Gaza had been damaged or destroyed by October 2025, and Gaza’s civil defence says 2,000 buildings across the territory are at risk of collapse. Last week, 21 people, including 12 children, died in Gaza City after a six-storey building that local authorities said had been hit repeatedly by Israeli airstrikes collapsed. Israel denied having struck the building. Arafat lives with her six daughters and husband in their old apartment building in Gaza City’s Al-Shati Refugee Camp, which they left at the height of the conflict that began in October 2023 with Hamas’s massive attack on Israel. The family returned after an October 2025 ceasefire, which has reduced but not ended Israeli strikes. They found that their four-storey building, in which 30 people now live, had collapsed inward at the ground floor, the result, she said, of an Israeli ground operation in the area. Like most buildings in Gaza City, the windows were blown away by blasts, with makeshift bedsheets spread across the frames providing little privacy. As…