A war-damaged apartment block in Gaza City came down overnight on Wednesday, and by morning the street outside it looked like every other patch of rubble in Gaza — except this one still had people underneath it. At least 12 Palestinians are dead, several of them children, and rescue crews say nearly 100 more may still be buried.

What Happened

The seven-storey building had already taken damage earlier in the war. It gave way sometime before dawn, burying families who had moved in because they had nowhere else to go. Gaza’s civil defence service said at least 12 people were killed and 14 others injured in the collapse.

Crews worked through the morning with whatever tools they had. Video from the scene showed rescuers pulling two people out from beneath a collapsed wall, and images shared online showed a civil defence worker carrying a young girl, wrapped in a blood-stained scarf, away from the wreckage.

Officials say the building had housed several displaced families before it fell.

Rescuers Racing Against Time

Raed Al-Dahshan, who directs Gaza City’s civil defence service, said crews had not given up on finding survivors. “We are still hearing voices from under the rubble, so there is still hope to find people,” he said.

The problem is equipment. Gaza’s rescue teams have spent months warning that they lack the machinery needed to dig through collapsed concrete safely, which leaves crews doing dangerous work by hand.

Why This Keeps Happening

This is not an isolated accident. Gaza’s civil defence service estimates that roughly 2,000 damaged buildings across the territory are still inhabited by families with nowhere else to go, and Mahmoud Basal, the service’s spokesperson, said hundreds more are close to failing outright. “There are approximately 400 buildings at risk of collapse. And we know that these buildings will collapse, especially now with the upcoming winter,” he said.

Years of bombing have left the strip with an enormous amount of physical wreckage. The United Nations has estimated the war has generated around 61 million tons of debris, a volume officials say could take up to seven years to fully clear.

Palestinian and UN officials say Israeli restrictions on what equipment is allowed into Gaza are a major reason heavy clearance machinery remains scarce. Israel has said its restrictions exist to stop militant groups from getting hold of that same equipment.

The Bigger Picture

For families in Gaza, the choice is rarely between a safe home and a damaged one — it’s between a damaged building and no roof at all. With so much housing destroyed, tens of thousands of people have moved into structures that were never cleared or repaired because there was nowhere else to go. Wednesday’s collapse is a reminder of what that gamble can cost.

Rescue operations were still underway as of Wednesday, with crews working section by section through the wreckage. Officials have not said how long the search is expected to continue, and the death toll could still rise as more of the rubble is cleared.

FAQs

Where did the building collapse today? 

The collapse happened in Gaza City, where a seven-storey apartment building that had already been damaged earlier in the war came down overnight into Wednesday morning. The building had been sheltering several displaced families at the time it fell, and the area has since been sealed off while rescue crews search the site.

How many buildings has Gaza destroyed? 

Estimates vary, but UN assessments have put the share of destroyed or damaged buildings across Gaza at close to 80 percent of the territory’s total housing stock. Separately, Gaza’s civil defence service says around 2,000 damaged buildings are still occupied by displaced families, and roughly 400 more are considered at serious risk of collapsing on their own, without any further strikes or shelling involved.

What was the worst building collapse in history? 

Outside of war zones, some of the deadliest recorded building collapses include the 2013 Rana Plaza garment factory collapse in Bangladesh, which killed more than 1,100 people, and various large-scale earthquake-related building failures over the decades. In active conflict zones like Gaza, though, collapses tend to be driven by prior structural damage from strikes rather than a single catastrophic engineering failure, which makes direct comparisons difficult.