Nearly three years into Israel's war on Gaza, the territory's housing crisis has passed from emergency into structural permanence. A joint UN-World Bank-EU assessment found that 76.6 percent of Gaza's housing stock — 371,888 units — has been destroyed or damaged as of October 2025. The price tag for rebuilding exceeds $71 billion over a decade. Meanwhile, Israeli restrictions block the entry of tents, tarpaulins, and construction materials, ensuring that the destruction cannot be addressed even provisionally. Families like Masada Abu Jarad's illustrate the trap. Originally from Beit Lahiya, displaced early in the war, she now occupies a partially collapsed apartment in Gaza City's Palestine Square with a tent pitched under the exposed roof. The Palestinian Red Crescent and Civil Defence have warned her to leave. She asks the only question that matters: where? Rental costs are prohibitive, alternatives nonexistent. The September 16 collapse of a six-storey war-damaged residential building in Gaza City — killing 21 people, including 12 children — made the risk tangible. But for Abdullah Abu Hajar, living in the severely damaged al-Najma building in Gaza City's Remal neighbourhood with 17 other families, the collapse was not news but confirmation. He stays awake at night listening for structural sounds — concrete shifting, stones moving, unexplained creaking — while his wife and five children sleep. Israel's refusal to allow proper reconstruction materials into Gaza converts destroyed housing from a war consequence into a sustained policy instrument. The population is trapped between structures that may collapse and open ground with no shelter. UNICEF estimates 84 percent of Gaza's population — more than 1.76 million people — live in overcrowded displacement sites or damaged, inadequate shelters. Winter approaches with its rain and cold, threatening to accelerate structural failures in already weakened buildings. Islam Hassanein, a mother of five, lives in a single room on the third floor of a leaning, damaged building — a room she cleared of rubble herself. The plumbing does not work. Last winter, the building flooded when it rained. A column has already fallen. She says she would leave immediately if offered a safe place and a tent. Neither is available. The $71.5 billion recovery estimate from the UN reflects not just housing but the entirety of Gaza's destroyed infrastructure. But the housing number is the sharpest indicator of the policy dynamic: destruction is near-total, reconstruction is blocked, and the population absorbs the full cost in physical danger and psychological exhaustion. This is not a recovery that has stalled — it is a recovery that has been prevented from starting. The trajectory is clear. Without a change in Israeli policy on material entry and reconstruction, Gaza's remaining structures will continue to degrade. Winter will accelerate that degradation. The population will continue to shelter in buildings that everyone — residents, civil defence, the UN — knows are unsafe, because the alternative is no shelter at all.
