Israeli strike flattens 14‑storey Mushtaha Tower in Gaza City as residents flee
Explosion levels a high‑rise used to shelter displaced families
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A massive explosion reduced the 14‑storey Mushtaha Tower to rubble on Friday, sending an enormous plume of smoke over Gaza City and deepening daytime terror for thousands who have already been uprooted by months of war.
Video shared on social media and by local news outlets showed the residential block in the Al‑Rimal neighbourhood collapsing after a blast at its base. Gaza’s civil defence said at least 19 people were killed in strikes in and around Gaza City on the same day, an area the United Nations says is now home to nearly one million people and where it has warned a famine is under way.
“Less than half an hour after the evacuation orders, the tower was bombed,” said Arej Ahmed, a 50‑year‑old displaced woman who lives in a tent in the city’s southwest. She said her husband watched residents throwing mattresses and clothing from upper floors to hastily flee the building.
“They were trying to take their belongings and run,” Arej added by telephone. “Everyone is scared and doesn’t know where to go.”
Israeli military action and denials from building management
Israel’s military said it had targeted tall buildings it asserted were being used by Hamas, and announced an intensified campaign against Gaza City. Defence Minister Israel Katz said in a statement the operation would be tightened until Hamas accepted Israel’s terms to end the war; a military spokesman, Nadav Shoshani, said the start of a campaign to seize the city would not be announced in advance to “maintain the element of surprise.” Another army spokesman, Effie Defrin, said Israeli forces already controlled about 40% of the city.
But the management of Mushtaha Tower denied the claim that the building was being used by fighters, Al Jazeera Arabic reported, saying the structure had been accessible only to displaced civilians. The contradictory accounts highlight the acute difficulty of independent verification inside Gaza, where journalists and aid groups struggle to operate amid heavy fighting.
Human cost and the collapse of safe spaces
For many in Gaza City, high‑rise apartment blocks and former hotels became makeshift shelters as ground fighting and bombardment shredded neighbourhoods. That relocation of hundreds of thousands into denser pockets has made the city’s towers focal points in an urban battlefield, heightening the risk to civilians when those buildings are struck.
“My children are terrified, and so am I,” said Ahmed Abu Wutfa, 45, seeking refuge in a partially destroyed fifth‑floor apartment. “There is no safe place — we only hope that death comes quickly.”
International organisations and monitor groups say the scale of displacement, coupled with blocked aid and destroyed infrastructure, has produced a humanitarian catastrophe. The global hunger monitor IPC recently concluded that an entirely man‑made famine is occurring in Gaza, a view echoed by UN human rights chief Volker Turk, who told reporters the famine was directly linked to Israeli policies restricting food, water and fuel into the territory.
International alarm and legal questions
The strike on Mushtaha Tower escalates scrutiny of the conduct of both sides since the conflict flared in October 2023, when Hamas’s assault into southern Israel killed 1,219 people, largely civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli figures. Israel’s subsequent campaign in Gaza has killed tens of thousands; Gaza’s health ministry, which the United Nations considers a reliable source for the territory, reports more than 64,300 Palestinians have died, most of them civilians.
Calls for accountability have grown louder. European Commission vice‑president Teresa Ribera described the war as genocide and criticised the EU for failing to act to stop it. The International Panel of Genocide Scholars and other legal experts have debated whether actions in Gaza meet the legal threshold for genocide, and this month the largest association of genocide scholars passed a resolution saying the criteria have been met — a finding that has intensified international debate and diplomatic pressure.
Legal scholars caution that such determinations are complex and hinge on intent as well as outcome, but they say the repeated targeting of populated civilian infrastructure and restrictions on basic life‑saving supplies raise urgent legal and moral questions. International law prohibits indiscriminate attacks on civilians; whether military necessity justifies striking dense residential buildings is increasingly contested.
What comes next?
The destruction of another high‑rise in Gaza City poses immediate questions for civilians, relief workers and world leaders. Where can hundreds of thousands of displaced people find shelter if towers that once offered refuge are no longer safe? How will humanitarian agencies reach areas that the Israeli military says it intends to control? And what leverage do external powers have to prevent further collapse of basic services and avert deeper famine?
As the fighting centres on densely populated urban terrain, the human consequences will almost certainly mount. The scene in Gaza City — families hurling possessions from balconies, tents full of people with nowhere else to go, smoke hanging over flattened blocks — is a reminder of a grim global pattern: urban warfare increasingly displaces and traps civilians in shrinking pockets of safety.
For now, survivors pick through dust and ruins and ask what remains of a fragile normality. For many, the questions are simple and existential: where to sleep tonight, how to feed hungry children tomorrow, and whether anyone outside the embattled enclave will act to change the course of a war that has already exacted such a terrible toll.
By Ali Musa
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
