Gaza Towers: At the Forefront of 'Rubble Policy'

Author: علي حبيب الله

No Palestinian city has experienced the construction of residential and commercial towers in its urban space like Gaza City has since the Second Intifada. While towers and skyscrapers in Arab cities and capitals symbolize modernization, development, and stability, their construction in Gaza stems from a different narrative related to population density and housing shortages amidst a limited geography blockaded for decades. This has made the construction of high-rise buildings in Gaza an attempt by the city to accommodate its residents and their aspirations, especially the younger generations, to provide them shelter in light of the constricted geography.

This is especially true considering the demographic makeup of the Gaza Strip as a historical refugee area, where its refugees have nothing but dreams of returning to the lands taken from them during the Nakba of 1948.

According to an architectural study by architect Abdul Karim Mohsen from Gaza titled: "The Planning Values of Housing Projects in the Gaza Strip and Their Reflection on Housing Projects," the number of residential towers in the Strip between 2001 and 2011 reached 250, doubling in the second decade. The wars in Gaza in 2012, 2014, and 2021 targeted some of these towers and destroyed them, to the extent that these wars are linked in the memory of Gaza residents to the bombing by the Israeli Air Force and the destruction of their city’s towers, such as the Al-Zaher Tower or the Italian Tower during the 2014 war. However, the ongoing extermination war against the Strip and its people has led to high-rise towers and large housing complexes being the first targets from the very beginning of the war on October 8, 2023. This represents a process aimed at erasing Gaza's urban landscape through a rubble policy that began with the total bombing of the intelligence towers area at the onset of the war and continued to include the "Mushat" and "Al-Susi" towers in recent days.

Bombing and destroying a residential tower in Gaza is akin to targeting an entire neighborhood, as the towers house hundreds of Gazans, many of whom found themselves displaced in tent camps since the outset of the war after receiving orders to evacuate before their buildings were bombed. This is assuming they were warned about the bombing in advance to evacuate; many Gaza families that have been erased from Gaza’s civil registry during the years of war perished beneath the rubble of their homes which were bombed without prior notice or before they could evacuate after being warned.

In a conversation with a survivor of the extermination war in Gaza, Nazmiya Safadi, whom we recently interviewed in Jerusalem, she stated that she lived with her surviving family members in an apartment owned by the family in one of the residential towers in the Rimal neighborhood. She and her family left the apartment after receiving evacuation orders from the occupation army in the early months of the war, leading the Safadi family on a path of permanent displacement until they managed to leave the Strip through the Rafah crossing into Egypt.

However, some families residing in the tower where the Safadi family lived were killed during its bombing after refusing to leave, as they chose to stay and die there rather than face displacement and homelessness, or because they did not take the evacuation orders and warnings of bombardment seriously!

When we asked Safadi what it means that some families in the residential towers in Gaza do not take evacuation orders seriously amidst an unprecedentedly brutal war, she replied that since the early days of the war, the occupation army often warned residents of some towers and residential complexes in Gaza to evacuate as they would be bombed within minutes, forcing residents to leave.

However, the occupation army would not bomb them, prompting residents to return, only for the evacuation order to be repeated several times over the days without actual bombing, to the point where some began to view the evacuation orders and bombing warnings as insincere, merely to exhaust the population and punish them. However, in the end, the bombings did occur, resulting in the demise and martyrdom of some families under the rubble of their tower apartments, in a policy adopted by the occupation army to mislead people by killing them in their homes while having previously "warned" them about evacuating.

Essentially, targeting residential towers in past wars on Gaza, particularly the 2014 war, which the occupation army called "Operation Protective Edge," marked the first time residential towers housing dozens, if not hundreds, of Gazans were targeted and destroyed, leveling them to the ground. This became one of the key issues for prosecuting Israel internationally for committing war crimes. In this sense, the targeting of residential towers by the occupation army has become the primary sign of Israel’s war crimes in the Strip.

At that time, ten years ago, targeting a tower or residential complex in Gaza would cause embarrassment for the Israeli government and its army, forcing them to form investigation committees and prepare official reports to explain and clarify their bombings to international legal and humanitarian organizations. Some of these reports are published and available on the pages and websites of various Israeli media and research centers to this day, including a report in Hebrew titled: "There is Nothing Immune: The Destruction of Central Buildings in the Strip by Israel," prepared by Amnesty International, documenting the targeting of four commercial and residential complexes and towers in the Strip during the "Operation Protective Edge" in 2014: the Commercial Center Tower in Rafah, Al-Zaher Tower 4, the Italian Complex, and the Pasha Tower in Gaza City.

Since the inception of its extermination war on the residents of the Strip, the occupation army has targeted everything related to human and stone in Gaza, including various crowded residential complexes and towers, regardless of their locations and names, throughout the city of Gaza and the strip in general. The occupation army has repeatedly published maps during the war warning residents of towers and residential complexes of the need to evacuate before bombings, the latest of which was a map published by the occupation army in recent days indicating specific targets for buildings and residential towers in Gaza city marked in red, warning residents of the impending bombings.

The bombing and destruction of Gaza's towers recently aligns with a plan prepared by the occupation army to occupy the city. In addition to the ongoing policy of erasure that governs the narrative of the extermination war on the Strip by killing and destroying everything that moves and exists on its land, the recent military campaign against the city’s residential towers relates to a plan for occupying it in terms of pushing its residents to flee southwards, as necessitated by the plan of occupying the city. This has been ongoing since the bombing of the "Mushat" tower, consisting of 15 floors in the Rimal neighborhood, and the "Al-Susi" tower, consisting of 60 apartments in Gaza City. Alongside this, occupation army leaders have claimed, according to recent reports published by Israeli media, that resistance in Gaza uses those towers to monitor the positions and movements of the occupation army in the Strip, which "requires" targeting and flattening them to the ground.

The bombing of residential complexes and towers does not solely affect Gaza residents by displacing them and turning them into wandering refugees in the Strip, nor does it just cause damage to nearby buildings and houses and terrorize children and women in the vicinity of the bombings. However, targeting and flattening them also raises the idea of survival and the possibility of rebuilding in Gaza. The existence of urban structures, especially tall ones like residential towers and complexes amidst war, has given some Gazans - as expressed recently on their pages and accounts - hope for the continuation of life conditions in the Strip, which the occupation insists on eradicating.