When a Tower Falls: Gaza City’s Mushtaha Tower and the Anatomy of a Collapsed Refuge
When the Mushtaha Tower came down, it sounded like a city losing its memory.
One instant, windows glittered against a washed-out Mediterranean sky; the next, a 14-storey block folded into itself in a dull, violent rumble. A great, dirty cloud rose and swallowed the sun for a moment. People who live by the sound of the sea and the cadence of daily prayers found themselves counting rubble instead of blessings.
The scene
It was the Al-Rimal neighbourhood of Gaza City — a part of the strip where the urban grid runs up close to the shoreline, where apartment towers and narrow alleys mark lives layered upon lives. Video circulating online shows the Mushtaha Tower shudder, a violent bloom at its base, and then collapse, floor by floor, like a house of cards knocked by a single, terrible hand.
“We saw people on the balconies throwing things down,” said Arej Ahmed, a 50-year-old displaced woman who now sleeps in a tent southwest of the city. “They were trying to save what little they could. Less than half an hour after a call came through to leave, the explosion hit.”
Across the city, the fear was palpably new, even to those who had lived through months of bombardment. “Everyone is scared and doesn’t know where to go,” said Ahmed Abu Wutfa, 45, who is sheltering in a damaged fifth-floor flat. “There is no safe place — we only hope that death comes quickly.” His words carry the bleak humour and raw exhaustion of many here: defeatist, desperate, human.
Orders, denials, and collapse
Israel’s military said it targeted tall buildings believed to be used by Hamas, and that some civilians had been ordered to evacuate prior to strikes. A spokesman suggested that the strikes are part of a broader push to seize Gaza City, and officials have said they will not announce operations in advance to retain “the element of surprise.”
Still, the building’s management denies the claim that Mushtaha Tower housed fighters, and says it opened its doors to displaced families. “This was a refuge for people who had nowhere else,” a manager told an Arabic network. “There were children inside, families who fled other attacks.”
Such contradictions are now a daily rhythm: warnings that are too short, denials that never reach the middle of the rubble, and a cascade of images that are impossible to reconcile.
Numbers and realities
Among the figures that must be named: Gaza’s civil defence reported at least 19 people were killed today in and around Gaza City. The United Nations estimates that the parts of Gaza under the fiercest assault are home to nearly one million people and has declared a famine in the area.
Other markers of the human toll are staggering: according to Gaza’s health ministry — figures the UN considers reliable — some 64,300 Palestinians have been killed since October 2023, most of them civilians. The October 2023 Hamas attacks that ignited this round of violence killed roughly 1,219 people in Israel, according to AFP’s tally based on Israeli figures.
- Today’s reported fatalities in and around Gaza City: at least 19 (Gaza civil defence)
- Total deaths in Gaza since Oct 2023: approximately 64,300 (Gaza health ministry; UN considers reliable)
- People living in the besieged areas of Gaza City: nearly one million (UN estimate)
- The Global Hunger Monitor (IPC): currently classifies Gaza’s situation as a man-made famine
These are not just numbers. Each is a name erased, a market stall that never reopens, a child who learns fear before the alphabet.
A war of towers: the urban battlefield
Towering apartment blocks, once symbols of modern Gaza life, have become contested terrain. For residents who fled to these tall buildings from ground-level devastation, the towers were a horizontal refuge turned vertical trap.
“We sought shelter higher up because bombing had taken the streets,” a local teacher who asked to be called Samir said. “Higher floors felt safer until they didn’t. The lines of sight changed; the city became a chessboard, and we are the pieces.”
The logic of urban warfare is brutal and simple: control the heights, control movement. But what happens when the “heights” are also homes, markets, and shelters for displaced families? How does an attack that targets a building factor in the presence of thousands of civilians clustered inside and around it?
International alarms and legal questions
Beyond Gaza’s rubble, the diplomatic ripples are growing. International voices, including European Commission vice-president Teresa Ribera, have used the word “genocide” to describe the trajectory of the war — a label that has sharpened criticism of Israel and raised urgent calls for action. The world’s largest association of genocide scholars passed a resolution saying legal criteria have been met to establish that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
Meanwhile, UN human rights officials and humanitarian monitors warn that policies around access to food, medical care, and safe passage have created conditions described by the IPC and the UN as an entirely man-made famine. UN human rights chief Volker Türk said the famine was the direct result of policies blamed on the Israeli government.
These declarations move the debate from the field of military strategy to the courts of moral and legal responsibility. They force global citizens — not only strategists and diplomats — to ask: what is the responsibility of outside actors when an urban population is squeezed to the point of starvation?
Stories among the ruins
At a makeshift tent cluster near the sea, children play amid the half-eaten leftovers of a life interrupted. A vendor who once sold falafel near the Corniche walks through the dust, his hands empty. The morning call to prayer echoes differently now — quieter, interrupted by the diesel whispers of generators, the crackle of frayed radios, the language of alerts.
“We are exhausted of counting the dead and counting our food,” a young mother, Huda, whispered, hugging a toddler who refused to sleep. “We used to argue about rent. Now we argue about what to give the baby to eat.”
Stories like Huda’s are fragments of a larger narrative: one of displacement on an industrial scale, of families whose maps have been erased and redrawn daily. They are a human ledger against the sterile terms of “tactical advantage” and “military necessity.”
What are we to do — and to feel?
Look at the images: a tower collapsing, a cloud of dust, people sifting through concrete. Do you see strategy or tragedy? How do you reconcile an urgent call for security with the urgent needs of those whose daily reality is survival?
This is not a small question. It is the wound at the heart of modern urban conflict. As the international community debates labels and legal frameworks, the people of Gaza count the immediate costs — food, shelter, dignity.
In the end, the Mushtaha Tower is more than a fallen building. It is a mirror. It asks us to look at how war is waged in cities, what rights civilians truly hold when the ground beneath them is declared an “operational” zone, and what values the global community chooses to prioritize when the daily math of survival is so stark.
There are no easy answers. But the pictures, the names, the tolls — and the voices like Arej’s, like Huda’s — demand we do more than scroll past. They demand that we listen.
