21 killed as war-damaged Gaza building collapses; eight children among dead

In the early hours of a Wednesday in Gaza City, a six-storey building long tilted by war finally gave way, killing at least 21 people — eight of them children — who had sheltered there not out of ignorance but out of desperation. The structure had been visibly failing since an Israeli strike more than a year prior, yet the families inside remained because the alternatives had long since vanished. This collapse is not merely an accident of engineering; it is the arithmetic of a prolonged catastrophe in which 80 percent of Gaza's structures have been damaged or destroyed, nearly two million peop