A seven-story apartment building already scarred by an earlier Israeli strike collapsed overnight in Gaza City's Tal al-Hawa neighborhood, killing at least 12 people and leaving as many as 100 more feared trapped beneath the rubble, rescue workers said Wednesday.
Roughly ten families had been living in the building despite warnings that its structure was unsafe, residents and Gaza's civil defense agency said. At least five children were among the dead, and 14 people were confirmed injured as crews dug through the night and into the morning. Raed al-Dahshan, director of Gaza City's civil defense service, said rescuers were still detecting signs of life beneath the debris.
"We are still hearing voices from under the rubble, so there is still hope to find people."
Raed al-Dahshan, Gaza City civil defense director
The cause of the collapse had not been determined by Wednesday morning. Gaza's civil defense service said it lacked the heavy machinery needed for a fast search, forcing crews to work in part with bulldozers and, in places, their bare hands. Alessandro Mrakic, who heads the UN Development Programme's Gaza office, said the shortage of equipment was compounding an already dire situation.
"The situation, as you see, is tragic because we don't have the equipment and machinery that is needed."
Alessandro Mrakic, UNDP Gaza office head
A building marked for collapse
The disaster is the latest in a string of collapses among Gaza's damaged housing stock. Aid officials estimate that roughly 2,000 damaged buildings across the territory are still inhabited, many by families with nowhere else to go, and that around 400 of them are considered at risk of collapse — a danger officials warn will grow as winter weather sets in. The United Nations has estimated that nearly two years of bombardment have left behind more than 60 million tons of rubble and debris, a volume that could take roughly seven years to clear even under a best-case timeline, according to UN environmental assessments of the strip.
Wednesday's collapse occurred nearly a year after a U.S.-brokered ceasefire, reached in October 2025, halted the largest-scale fighting between Israel and Hamas. That truce has not stopped the dying: rights monitors and local health officials say Israeli strikes have continued intermittently since, and more than 1,300 Palestinians are reported to have been killed in Gaza in the months since the ceasefire took effect, according to tallies compiled by aid groups tracking compliance with the deal. Israeli forces have withdrawn from roughly half of Gaza's territory under the agreement, while Hamas has retained control over the remainder, and disputes between the two sides over the pace of implementation have persisted.
Nowhere safe to live
For many Gaza City residents, the calculus of returning to damaged homes has been one of necessity rather than choice. Displacement camps remain overcrowded, and shortages of tents and building materials have pushed families back into structures that engineers have not cleared as safe. Local officials have appealed for additional heavy equipment and structural inspections to be allowed into the territory, warning that the building that fell Wednesday will not be the last.
Shifa Hospital, which received casualties from the scene, confirmed the death toll Wednesday morning as search efforts continued. Gaza's civil defense service said crews would keep working through the day as long as there was a chance of finding survivors, even as hopes dimmed for those still listed as missing.
The collapse is likely to add pressure on mediators — the United States, Egypt and Qatar — who have struggled for months to move the fragile Gaza truce into a more durable second phase, including reconstruction funding and a broader Israeli withdrawal. No timeline for that next phase has been agreed, and Wednesday's disaster underscored how far conditions on the ground in Gaza City remain from anything resembling normal life, even a year after the guns were meant to have gone quiet.
