Gaza’s displaced face a deadly choice: collapsing buildings or flooded tents

With thousands of buildings damaged and the punishing winter fast approaching, displaced Palestinians sheltering inside Gaza’s ruins face two bitter choices: sleep beneath unstable concrete or risk having nowhere to stay at all.

Pieces of concrete sometimes break loose without warning, and stones tumble from damaged walls. Yet fear of the coming winter drives families to seek any shelter with a concrete roof, no matter how fractured it may be. They view these broken structures as their final line of defence against the looming winter storms.

However, this choice carries potentially catastrophic risks. Instead of keeping families warm and dry, cracked ceilings can let rainwater seep through, flooding their makeshift living spaces.

Displaced families are already making exhausting efforts to patch gaps and holes, using whatever remnants of plastic or cloth they can find to block the biting cold and winter winds. For many, even the short walk to collect water means passing beneath sections of a building that appear ready to collapse at any moment.

Families are trapped inside bomb-damaged houses, schools and universities. Cracked walls and weakened ceilings surround them, but leaving could mean returning to sodden tents, sleeping in the mud outdoors or beginning yet another agonising search for shelter.

Read: Gaza winter nears as 162,000 tents become unusable, raising fears of humanitarian crisis

“Unfortunately, whenever we sit here, stones fall on us,” said Maher Awad Khader, a displaced resident sheltering with his family at the Islamic University of Gaza. “Everything is in terrible condition, even when we go to carry water. I have been here for four or five months. This is the only place where we have been able to take shelter.”

For displaced families like Maher’s, finding a roof in Gaza no longer necessarily means finding safety.

“When we find a place to sit, we sleep there,” Maher said. “But the same stones keep falling on us from the rubble.”

Maher said he has no job or income to support his family, nor the means to set up even a small makeshift stall to earn a living. He added that no humanitarian aid organisations or institutions had reached them with assistance, leaving them to face the coming winter alone.

The danger has become more acute following a series of building collapses in Gaza City.

Last month, the Al-Saada residential building in the Sabra neighbourhood collapsed, killing 21 people, most of them women and children. Days later, another damaged building came down in the same area.

The incidents have renewed fears over thousands of structures weakened during the war but still being used as shelters by displaced families who have few, if any, alternatives.

For them, displacement is no longer only about escaping bombardment. It is also about deciding whether the building offering protection tonight could collapse before morning.

‘We have no choice’

A short distance from Maher, Taher Hajjo and his family are sheltering beneath what remains of another building at the Islamic University. He remembers the previous winter clearly.

Sections of the damaged structure repeatedly gave way, he said, while chunks of concrete and debris fell from different parts of the building almost every day.

Now, as another winter approaches, Taher is trying to reinforce the space around his family with whatever materials he can find.

Makeshift walls and basic supports have become a fragile line of defence around his children. They offer little reassurance.

Asked how he lives with the possibility that the ceiling above them could collapse, Taher replied: “Honestly, we have no choice. What can we do? May Allah bring relief to us and to everyone.”

That lack of choice has become a defining feature of life for many displaced families.

After repeated displacement and widespread destruction, moving again does not necessarily lead somewhere safer. For some, it simply means exchanging one danger for another.

A damaged concrete building may offer protection from rain and cold but carry the risk of collapse. A tent may remove the danger of falling masonry but leave families exposed to winter storms, flooding and freezing temperatures.

As the colder months approach, that calculation is becoming increasingly urgent.

Thousands of buildings at risk

The threat is not limited to the Islamic University.

Field assessments cited by Gaza’s Ministry of Public Works and Housing and engineering bodies have classified about 3,000 buildings across the Gaza Strip as highly dangerous and at risk of sudden collapse

Many remain occupied.

The danger is expected to increase during winter, when heavy rain, wind and severe weather can place additional pressure on structures already weakened by bombardment.

For families living inside them, a night of strong wind or heavy rainfall can bring fears that cracked walls will shift or damaged ceilings will finally give way.

The result is another form of displacement, driven not necessarily by a new attack or evacuation order but by the instability of what remains.

Gaza City officials have appealed to international organisations and UN agencies for urgent assistance, warning that winter could further endanger people sheltering inside unsafe buildings.

Municipal authorities say they lack the equipment and materials needed to secure or reinforce damaged structures on the scale required.

Gaza’s Civil Defence has also called for the entry of heavy machinery, rescue vehicles and concrete-cutting equipment, saying shortages make it far harder to reach people trapped beneath collapsed buildings.

Rescue operations are particularly difficult when large concrete slabs fall onto occupied rooms and teams lack specialised machinery to remove them

Officials have also called for prefabricated housing units and emergency shelter materials to provide alternatives for families living in buildings considered unsafe.

But for Maher and Taher, those appeals remain distant from the immediate question confronting their families each night: where else can they go

They know the buildings around them are damaged. They see the cracks, hear debris falling and remember the collapses elsewhere in Gaza.

Yet they remain.

In a place where displacement has already stripped thousands of families of their homes, even shelter has become another source of fear.

A roof, once the simplest symbol of protection, can now be the danger hanging directly overhead.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.