A RESIDENTIAL building collapsed in Gaza City overnight on Tuesday, killing at least 20 Palestinians, including five children, and trapping dozens more under the rubble, Palestinian Civil Defence said yesterday.
Fourteen others were injured when the six-storey building came down, the agency said.
Footage verified by Al Jazeera showed rescue teams pulling children from the wreckage, working alongside residents who dug by hand, with children’s cries for help audible from beneath the rubble as crews worked to reach survivors.
One video showed a young girl pulled out alive, and several other survivors, including breathless children, emerging before being taken away by ambulance.
Mahmoud Basal, a Gaza Civil Defence spokesperson, said teams were still working to recover the dead and search for the missing.
‘Until now, there are nearly 100 Palestinians still under the rubble of this building,’ he said, adding that rescue crews lacked the equipment needed to reach people trapped inside.
Local media reported the building had previously been struck in an earlier Israeli bombing, leaving it cracked and structurally unsound before it collapsed.
Israel’s genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza has damaged or partially destroyed thousands of buildings across the besieged territory.
Basal said many Palestinians are forced to remain in buildings that ‘threaten their lives’ because they have nowhere else to go ‘in the absence of refugee centres or suitable tents’.
Yahya Al Sarraj, the mayor of Gaza City, said the municipality and civil defence were ‘paralysed’, working hard to rescue people despite inadequate tools. ‘This is not the first collapse of a building and we fear that it may not be the last one,’ he said.
The Government Media Office in Gaza said it held ‘the Israeli occupation and the international community fully and directly responsible’ for the collapse, saying the building, which had four flats on each of its six floors, had been directly targeted during the war, weakening its structure and ultimately causing it to come down.
