Families in Gaza City recount the panic of fleeing their homes amid daily attacks on residential buidlings as Israel escalates its assault in northern Gaza.
Gaza City, Gaza Strip – On Friday morning, Abu Salah Khalil thought his biggest challenge that day would be finding his family’s next meal.
Sitting in Abu Saleh’s living room, three generations of his family deliberated over how to feed everyone.
The apartment of the 49-year-old father of four in Gaza City’s Mushtaha Tower had become a shelter for Abu Salah’s family members, including his elderly parents, his brother’s family, and his own wife and children – 17 people in total.
The family settled on making maqluba, layered vegetables and rice, but without the meat – there wasn’t any available. It would be their only meal of the day. Abu Salah’s nephew, meanwhile, was nervously studying for his high school graduation exams, due to take place online the next day. For the first time since Israel’s war began 22 months ago, Gaza’s students would sit for these exams.
“We woke up to a normal family atmosphere,” Abu Salah recalls.
He went out to buy vegetables and returned to boil coffee over a wood fire. But as the family drank their coffee, they heard screams in the hallway.
“We opened the door to ask what was going on,” Abu Salah says. “That’s when we heard the news: the tower would be bombed.”
They had just 30 minutes to evacuate the building.
In Gaza, a small coastal strip of land and one of the world’s most densely populated areas, many Palestinian families built their lives in high-rise residential towers.
Now, as Israeli forces intensify their assault to capture Gaza City, residential high-rises, many with apartments housing multiple displaced families, have become the latest targets, collapsing in moments and forcing residents into homelessness.
‘Neighbours were running’
The 12-storey Mushtaha Tower was the first of the high-rises in Gaza City that Israeli forces have destroyed since Friday.
There were eight apartments per floor – a vertical refuge for families, many already displaced numerous times.
As soon as Abu Salah and his family heard the warning, they started to flee the building. There was no time to collect any belongings. Since there was no electricity, the lift wasn’t working, so they had to take the stairs to descend six storeys.
Abu Salah’s father lost the use of both legs after the bombing of their previous home on Sea Street caused traumatic shock and paralysis. His mother, in her seventies, moves slowly.
“I carried my disabled father with my brother, while my wife helped my mother,” Abu Salah recounts. “In those moments, neighbours were running and screams filled the place, children crying and mothers not knowing which child to carry and which to drag.”
He barely noticed what was happening with his children, his eldest, a 19-year-old daughter, and his youngest, a toddler, as they climbed down the stairwell full of people. “I don’t know how my children got down or who carried my two-year-old son – I was occupied with my father and how to get him out of the house,” he says.
Once his family had made it out of the tower, Abu Salah wanted to return for some food and clothing, but his mother stopped him, fearing Israeli forces would bomb while he was inside. Minutes later came the final warning in a phone call to a resident: the building was going to be hit.
“They bombed it once and it remained standing, so we said ‘thank God’,” says Abu Salah, recalling how people cried while praying that the building wouldn’t collapse. The sound was deafening. “But minutes later came the second bombing that completely removed it. I wished I could embrace the house walls and tell them: stay strong and tall, don’t be affected by the missiles.”
Abu Salah says his only concern had been to get his family out safely, but when he saw the tower collapse, his “body began to tremble”.
His family is now living on the streets. “At night, we didn’t sleep from the shock. My children kept asking: ‘Where will we sleep? What do we put on the ground? Do we sleep on the bare floors?’”
‘Waiting to know our children’s fate’
On Saturday, Nadia Maarouf was outside her makeshift tent in Tal al-Hawa neighbourhood near the residential al-Soussi Tower. She was kneading dough and cooking beans with her daughters-in-law when they heard that a bombing was imminent.
A man came rushing down the street, telling people, “Al-Soussi Tower is threatened with bombing … evacuate the area.”
The 50-year-old and her family had fled Beit Lahiya in the north in May after their home was destroyed. “We had nothing left,” Nadia says sadly. “With great difficulty, we managed to buy some kitchen tools and pitch the tent. Everything here is expensive and if we lose it, we can’t replace it.”
When they heard about the bombing, her son, who lost his leg in shelling in Beit Lahiya, “started screaming: Get me out of here … I don’t want to die,” Nadia recounts, her voice choking with tears.
“We left everything and started running in the streets like madmen,” she recalls.
“I took my small grandson, two years old, and some clothes, and started running in the street. Each of us ran in a different direction – we no longer knew anything about each other. While running, I found a child from neighbouring tents crying, so I carried him with my other hand.”
Nadia, who lived with 17 family members, was “afraid we had forgotten someone in the tent … My heart was breaking from fear.”
Only half an hour passed from the time they heard about the tower being a target until it was bombed, Nadia says.
“We were waiting to know our children’s fate: had they all gotten out? Was anyone injured?”
After the building was flattened, Nadia and her family located their destroyed tents. “We started digging with our hands and moving stones to get our belongings out. We no longer had money to buy anything new.”
Dust and rubble blanketed the entire area, and Nadia found it difficult to breathe when she reached the site.
“I don’t know how my feet helped me run and escape,” she says. “My whole body was trembling, and my heartbeats were louder than the bombing sound.”
‘A small city’
Israeli forces also destroyed Al-Ru’ya Tower on Sunday.
Sarah al-Qattaa says the tower, which her husband, Ahmed Shamia, an engineer, designed, was a “living memory pulsing with every moment we lived”.
The tower reflected Ahmed’s architectural dreams for Gaza City, says Sarah: a tower sitting amid streets full of life, universities, and offices.
“From the first moment Ahmed drew the tower’s design lines, he wanted it to be a modern facade reflecting the city’s spirit,” she recalls.
“He saw in every corner an opportunity to tell a story of beauty. He chose colours carefully.”
Her husband, who was killed in an Israeli attack in May, had his office in the tower overlooking the sea, and kept all his projects and sketches there.
“His soul was attached to the tower,” Sarah says. If he had witnessed its collapse, it wouldn’t have just been “stones collapsing, but an entire lifetime breaking and personal history disappearing under rubble.”
Israel has destroyed at least 50 buildings during its recent campaign to seize Gaza City, according to the Palestinian Civil Defence.
Akram al-Sourani, a Palestinian writer from Gaza, says home isn’t just walls and a ceiling but an accumulation of life and memories.
These towers weren’t luxury or architectural choices, he says, but “a necessity imposed by narrow space and population density”.
He lamented the loss of these stacked households in a viral poem shared on social media where he described the families of 50 apartments leaving behind an “elevator with a thousand stories” and the objects of their lives – a Barbie doll, a bathrobe behind a bathroom door, a backgammon table, internet bills.
“The tower isn’t just a building, it’s an entire neighbourhood, a small city teeming with life. It has apartments, neighbours, elevators and daily stories,” he explains. “Every corner carries a tale.”
This piece was published in collaboration with Egab.
