Damaged and dilapidated homes are a 'silent threat' against Gaza's Palestinians

Khamis Al-Turk, a 48-year-old, has no other option but to take refuge in his house in Gaza, on the verge of collapse, to shelter his family of seven. The eastern wall of the house is visibly leaning, as if propped up by air, while crude wooden beams intertwine beneath a cracked ceiling, placed in a desperate attempt to prevent it from collapsing onto the heads of those sleeping below.

With every gust of wind and the first drops of rain, sharp cracking and splitting sounds echo inside the house, like the groans of a dying building. Al-Turk told The New Arab, pointing at the ceiling, "At night we hear sounds as if the walls are moving. Sometimes we wake up believing the house will collapse in the next moment."

In one corner of the narrow room, Khamis's young child sleeps beside a cracked wall, scarred by shells that have carved deep black lines into it. The father has no luxury of moving his son's mattress to a safer place, as every corner of the house carries the same danger.

"I watch him all night. I'm afraid the wall will fall on him while he's sleeping. We don't sleep—we just wait," the father said.

The decision to return to the partially destroyed house was not a free choice, but a forced step imposed by reality. Al-Turk explained, "We spent long months living in tents after being displaced from Gaza City at the beginning of the war. The cold gnawed at the children, the rain flooded everything, and illness never left us. We couldn't endure it. A tent protects you from nothing—not from the cold, and not from fear."

"When I returned to my home in Gaza at the end of last October, many relatives told me the house was unfit for living because parts of it had collapsed. Yes, I know that, but where can we go? Shelters are overcrowded, and tents have become slow graves. We chose a danger we can see with our own eyes over another danger we live with every day," he added.

Al-Turk tried to reinforce the walls with whatever materials he could find, wooden planks and old iron wires collected from the rubble of nearby houses. "This isn't repair," he said. "It's just postponing death."

Then he added, "We live hoping the day will pass without the ceiling collapsing."

A silent threat

Under the pressure of a complete lack of housing alternatives, thousands of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have been forced to live inside partially damaged and structurally unsafe homes, after shelters themselves were bombed and destroyed during the war.

According to Palestinian reports, at least 87 shelters were directly targeted or rendered out of service, forcing hundreds of thousands of displaced people to search for any available refuge—even if it is at risk of collapsing at any moment—amid an almost total absence of the resources and capabilities needed to deal with potential disasters resulting from building collapses.

Experts in engineering and public safety warn of the danger posed by tilted and cracked residential buildings spread across all neighbourhoods of Gaza City, stressing that even slight vibrations, strong winds, or ordinary natural factors could be enough to cause the sudden collapse of these structures.

The risks are compounded in densely populated areas, where vehicles pass daily alongside damaged buildings, alongside displaced people and street vendors, and near popular markets, placing hundreds of people at constant risk of their lives.

On a heavy winter evening, Anwar Abdel Hadi's family home in Gaza City was resisting total collapse. The cracked walls no longer concealed their weakness, and the ceiling—eaten away by shrapnel and damp—had become a suspended burden over the heads of its residents. On 13 January, as a deep winter storm struck the Gaza Strip, this silent threat turned into real injuries.

Abdel Hadi told TNA, "We knew the ceiling was damaged, but we didn't expect it to collapse so quickly. Suddenly, we heard a sound like an explosion, and then concrete blocks fell onto the room where the children were sleeping."

The partial collapse injured three of his children to varying degrees, after part of the unstable ceiling gave way, filling the room with dust and stones—a scene the father describes as "a moment of complete paralysis, when you don't know whom to save first."

"My wife screamed, and the children were screaming under the rubble. I thought we were all going to die. This isn't shelling—this is a slow death waiting for us every rainy night," Abdel Hadi added.

After the incident, the family had no option but to leave. Shelters, as he describes them, are unbearably overcrowded. "I went myself to look for a place in a nearby school. One classroom can hold two or more families. There's no privacy, no safety, and not even enough space for children to sleep. Some people sleep in corridors and bathrooms," he described.

"How can I take my injured children to a crowded, cold place with no bedding or blankets? The danger is there too — just in a different form," he added.

The lack of safe housing alternatives has made returning to the damaged home a forced choice with no way out.

"There are no ready homes, no sufficient tents, and no apartments for rent. Everything is either destroyed or full. We are trapped between walls that could collapse and nonexistent options," Abdel Hadi said.

As for repairs, they remain an impossible dream. "I don't have the money to fix anything, and even if I did, there are no building materials, no tools, and no entity that can help. Even a wooden plank or a concrete support has become a dream," he said, looking up at the ceiling propped up with crude wooden beams.

Today, the family sleeps in a single room, away from the damaged section, while the children huddle together near the least cracked wall in a desperate attempt to reduce the risk.

"We are not asking for luxury—just a roof that doesn't fall on our heads. Death, here, doesn't come only from the sky; sometimes it comes from the house itself," Abdel Hadi concluded.

The International Organisation for Migration has warned that more than 90% of homes in Gaza have been destroyed or damaged as a result of years of war, leaving vast numbers of residents without safe shelter.

In a statement, the organisation said, "With no safe places to go, families are being forced to seek refuge in the rubble of destroyed and uninhabitable homes."

Escalating risks

With the onset of winter, these risks have intensified further amid severe incapacity among municipalities and civil defence services, due to acute shortages of heavy machinery, specialised equipment, and fuel to operate them.

Mahmoud Basal, spokesperson for Gaza's Civil Defence, told TNA that more than 50 houses and buildings across the Gaza Strip have collapsed since the beginning of December during winter, resulting in the deaths of 24 Palestinians. Meanwhile, hundreds of multi-story buildings remain classified as at risk of collapsing at any moment.

"We are talking about an extremely dangerous reality, where thousands of Palestinians are living inside homes that are no longer fit for habitation and lack the most basic structural safety standards. Entire families, including women and children, sleep every day beneath cracked ceilings and leaning walls, fully aware that a strong gust of wind or a winter storm could turn these places into a mass grave," Basal said.

He emphasised that the absence of housing alternatives and the severe shortage of tents and shelters force citizens to return to collapsing homes, saying, "These are not voluntary choices, but coercive decisions imposed by war and destruction. People know the danger, but they have no other option to protect their children from the cold or homelessness."

Basal warned that stronger winds and winter storms significantly increase the risks, given the lack of technical capacity and heavy equipment available to civil defence and municipalities.

"We lack machinery, fuel, and the equipment needed to deal with collapses or rescue people trapped under rubble, due to the continued Israeli ban on the entry of such equipment into the Strip," he said.

He also pointed out that extreme population density exacerbates the situation, noting that the Israeli army controls about 60% of Gaza's territory, while residents are forced to live within no more than 36% of the area, at a population density of up to 62,000 people per square kilometre—turning any partial collapse into a large-scale humanitarian catastrophe.

Basal appealed to the international community and humanitarian organisations to act urgently, saying, "Buildings are no longer safe havens, and international silence is deepening the tragedy. What is needed is immediate intervention to provide safe housing alternatives, allow the entry of heavy equipment, and offer protection to civilians before we count new victims of a silent, preventable danger."