Their homes... like their lives!

Hiba Arafat places a water bottle on the floor, and it moves, sliding out of the room in this tilted building with cracked foundations, damaged by Israeli shelling.

Arafat, 47, like thousands in Gaza, has chosen to risk her life by living in a building on the verge of collapse, three years after the war that erupted following the Hamas attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023.

Speaking in an interview published by AFP today, as she moved from the living room to the kitchen as if climbing a small hill, she said, “We have no choice! We have nowhere else to go. All the houses have been destroyed and the land has been washed away. We have no place left, so we took refuge in this house.”

According to a United Nations estimate, 84 percent of buildings and structures in Gaza have been destroyed or damaged since the outbreak of the war.

Last week, 21 people, including 12 children, were killed in Gaza City after a six-story building collapsed. Local authorities said the building had been subjected to repeated Israeli airstrikes.

Arafat lives with her husband and her six daughters in their old apartment building in the Shati refugee camp in Gaza, which they had left at the height of the war.

Following the ceasefire agreement last October, the family returned home to find that the first floor had collapsed, causing the four-story building, which housed approximately 30 people, to tilt.

Husni Mahna, spokesperson for the Gaza Municipality, said, “These homes pose a real danger to the lives of the displaced people inside them, as well as to residents in the surrounding area and to displaced persons in nearby camps.”