A Damaged Home Is Not Shelter
Families in Gaza City are living in war-damaged buildings despite collapse warnings because repeated displacement, scarce alternatives, and unaffordable rent leave them nowhere safer to go.
Without inspections and replacement housing, residents must choose between homelessness and structures whose damaged roofs, columns, walls, and floors may fail without warning.
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A surviving room can retain the memory of family life without retaining the physical qualities of shelter. Calling its occupation resilience would hide the coercion: evacuation is not meaningful when officials can identify danger but cannot offer a safer destination.
In Gaza City, 60-year-old Masada Abu Jarad and her family are living beneath a partially collapsed roof, its broken concrete and exposed steel opening part of the apartment to the weather. They have pitched a tent inside the damaged room. The Palestinian Red Crescent and Civil Defence warned the family to leave, but no safer, affordable destination was offered.
Abu Jarad has lived near Palestine Square for about a year after returning to northern Gaza from an earlier displacement. It is not her original home. Her family came from Beit Lahiya, where destruction still prevents their return. Another move would continue a chain of displacement, and rent elsewhere is beyond what she says the family can pay.
The danger is not hypothetical. On September 16, a six-storey war-damaged residential building in Gaza City collapsed, killing 21 people, including 12 children, according to the United Nations and Gaza Civil Defence. Yet risk cannot be assigned evenly from photographs alone. A missing wall, a cracked column, a damaged foundation, and a punctured roof create different failure paths. Families need qualified inspections, not a general warning that ruins are dangerous.
The outline of home
After nearly three years of war, damaged housing has been pressed into service as emergency accommodation. A joint United Nations, World Bank, and European Union assessment found that 371,888 homes—76.6 percent of Gaza’s housing stock—had been damaged or destroyed by October 2025. The same assessment put broader recovery needs above $71bn over the following decade. Those figures describe not only loss but the severe shortage behind each decision to re-enter an unsafe building.
A recognizable doorway or family room can preserve an address, a routine, and a claim to return. It cannot make fractured concrete carry its former load. Memory makes the space legible; necessity makes it occupied. To celebrate that occupation as resilience would convert forced exposure into a virtue and let the absence of shelter policy disappear behind admiration for the people surviving it.
Evacuation orders have little meaning when they lead only to another exposed site. A workable system would triage buildings by structural risk, mark unsafe areas, publish inspection findings, and protect residents from rubble during assessment or controlled demolition. It would also provide weatherproof temporary housing, because the authority to condemn a room should carry an obligation to offer somewhere safer.
Families require choices that exist outside the language of endurance: credible engineering reviews, visible hazard markings, accessible temporary homes, rubble removal, and a route toward repair or safe return. The immediate question is not whether residents understand the danger. Abu Jarad plainly does. It is whether any institution can give her somewhere to go before the damaged building makes the decision for her.
Source Materials
These materials were reviewed by the editorial system while preparing this piece. Muerte.casa may interpret, satirize, reframe, or disagree with them.
- ‘Nowhere else to go’: Gaza families shelter in buildings that may collapse Al Jazeera · September 25, 2026 · Primary signal · Direct source
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