Gaza towers: at the forefront of the Tarkim policy

By: Ali Habiballah

No Palestinian city had been accustomed to building residential and commercial towers in its urban fabric the way Gaza City did since the aftermath of the Second Intifada. While towers and skyscrapers in other Arab cities and capitals serve as symbols of modernization, development and stability, their construction in Gaza stems from a different story — linked to population density and a housing squeeze within a confined and besieged geography for decades. That pressure turned the erection of high-rise buildings in Gaza into an attempt by the city to accommodate its residents and their aspirations, especially younger generations, by housing them despite the cramped and suffocating territory.

This is particularly true when taking into account the demographic composition of the Gaza Strip as a historical refuge, whose refugees possess little more than the dream of returning to the lands taken from them in the 1948 Nakba.

According to an architectural study by Gaza native architect Abdel Karim Mohsen titled “The Planning Values of Housing Projects in the Gaza Strip and Their Impact on Housing Projects,” the number of residential towers in the Strip between 2001 and 2011 reached 250, and that number doubled in the following decade. Gaza’s wars in 2012, 2014 and 2021 struck and destroyed some of those towers — so much so that those wars became linked in Gazans’ memory with air force strikes that demolished some of the city’s towers, such as Zafar Tower (the Italian Tower) in the 2014 war. But in the ongoing war of extermination against the Strip and its people, the large towers and residential complexes were among the first targets from the start of the campaign on October 7, 2023. That marked a campaign to erase Gaza’s urban face through a policy of “turkīm” — turning into rubble — beginning with the bombardment of the entire Intelligence Towers area at the outset of the war and extending to the Mushtah and Al-Sousi towers in recent days.

Striking and destroying a residential tower in Gaza is in many ways akin to targeting an entire neighborhood: towers house hundreds of Gazans in their apartments, and many found themselves displaced to refugee tents across the Strip after receiving evacuation orders before strikes. That is if they were warned at all, because hundreds of Gazan families erased from civil registers during the two years of war perished mainly under the rubble of their homes that were struck without prior warning or before they could evacuate after receiving warnings.

In a conversation with survivor Nazmiya Safadi, whom we recently met in Jerusalem, Safadi said she had been living with her surviving family in an apartment her family owned in one of the residential towers in the Rimal neighborhood. She and her family left the apartment after evacuation orders from the Israeli army in the early months of the war, and then began an ongoing displacement until they were able to leave the Strip via the Rafah crossing to Egypt.

But some families still living in the tower where Safadi’s family had resided were killed there after they refused to leave — having preferred to stay and risk death rather than face displacement and destitution, or because they did not take the evacuation orders and warnings of imminent strikes seriously.

When asked what it meant that some families in Gaza’s residential towers did not take evacuation orders seriously amid an unprecedentedly brutal war, Safadi replied that from the early days of the war the Israeli army frequently warned residents of certain towers and residential complexes that they had minutes to evacuate because the buildings would be struck, forcing people to leave.

Yet the Israeli army often did not carry out the strikes, which prompted residents to return. The evacuation orders would then be repeated — people evacuated a second and third time over several days without being hit — to the point where some began to regard evacuation warnings as unserious, a tactic to exhaust and punish residents. But the strikes eventually did occur, killing some families under the rubble of their tower apartments — a policy the army used to deceive people while claiming “legal cover” by arguing that they had warned residents to evacuate in advance.

Targeting residential towers in previous wars on Gaza — especially the 2014 war that the Israeli army called “Operation Protective Edge” — when towers housing tens or even hundreds of civilian Gazans were targeted and flattened, was one of the main grounds for international litigation against Israel for war crimes. In other words, residential towers and their targeting by the Israeli army became the primary indicator of Israeli war crimes in the Strip.

Back then, about a decade ago, striking a tower or residential complex in Gaza embarrassed the Israeli government and its military, pushing them to form investigative committees and produce official reports to explain and justify the strikes to legal and humanitarian international organizations. Some of those reports remain available on the websites of Israeli media and research centers to this day, including a report in Hebrew titled “Nothing Is Immune: Demolition of Central Buildings in the Strip by Israel,” prepared by Amnesty International, which documents the Israeli army’s targeting of four commercial and residential complexes and towers during Operation Protective Edge in 2014: the Commercial Center Tower in Rafah, Dhafar 4 Tower, the Italian Complex, and al-Basha Tower in Gaza City.

Since it began its genocidal war on the Strip’s population, the Israeli army has not hesitated to target anything connected to people or stone in Gaza, including densely populated residential complexes and towers of all kinds and in all locations and names across Gaza City and the Strip. During the war the army repeatedly released maps warning residents of towers and residential complexes to evacuate before they were struck; the most recent was a map published in recent days showing buildings and residential towers marked in red in Gaza City and warning their residents of impending strikes.

The recent strikes on Gaza’s towers and their destruction come within the context of a plan the Israeli army is preparing to occupy the city. Beyond the ongoing policy of erasure that governs the logic of the war of extermination — killing and destroying everything that exists on its land — the latest military campaign against the city’s residential towers is also related to a plan to occupy it by pushing its residents to flee southward, as required by the occupation plan. That has been underway for days following strikes on the 15-storey Mushtah tower in the Rimal neighborhood and the 60-apartment Al-Sousi tower in Gaza City. Israeli military commanders have also claimed, according to Israeli media outlets in recent days, that Gaza’s resistance uses those towers to observe Israeli troop positions and movements in the Strip, which “necessitates” striking them and reducing them to rubble.

Striking residential complexes and towers does not only displace and disperse Gaza’s residents, leaving them wandering internally displaced across the Strip and inflicting damage on nearby buildings and terrifying children and women in the vicinity. It also strikes at the idea of staying and the possibility of rebuilding Gaza. The continued existence of urban structures, especially tall ones like towers and major residential complexes during the war, provided some Gazans — as they expressed recently on their social media pages and accounts — with hope that conditions of life might again be resumed in the Strip, conditions that the occupation insists on erasing.