The last 30 minutes inside a Gaza City tower before it is bombed by Israel

On Friday morning, Abu Salah Khalil thought his biggest challenge that day would be finding his family’s next meal.

Sitting in Abu Saleh’s living room, three generations of his family deliberated over how to feed everyone.
The apartment of the 49-year-old father of four in Gaza City’s Mushtaha Tower had become a shelter for Abu Salah’s family members, including his elderly parents, his brother’s family, and his own wife and children – 17 people in total.

The family settled on making maqluba, layered vegetables and rice, but without the meat – there wasn’t any available. It would be their only meal of the day. Abu Salah’s nephew, meanwhile, was nervously studying for his high school graduation exams, due to take place online the next day. For the first time since Israel’s war began 22 months ago, Gaza’s students would sit for these exams.

“We woke up to a normal family atmosphere,” Abu Salah recalls.

He went out to buy vegetables and returned to boil coffee over a wood fire. But as the family drank their coffee, they heard screams in the hallway.

“We opened the door to ask what was going on,” Abu Salah says. “That’s when we heard the news: the tower would be bombed.”

They had just 30 minutes to evacuate the building.

In Gaza, a small coastal strip of land and one of the world’s most densely populated areas, many Palestinian families built their lives in high-rise residential towers.

Now, as Israeli forces intensify their assault to capture Gaza City, residential high-rises, many with apartments housing multiple displaced families, have become the latest targets, collapsing in moments and forcing residents into homelessness.

‘Neighbours were running’
The 12-storey Mushtaha Tower was the first of the high-rises in Gaza City that Israeli forces have destroyed since Friday.