Inside a battle-scarred Gaza building
Two years into Gaza’s war, the Skeik building stands as a concrete echo of a city that once blended daily life with the coastline’s promise. On a quiet road off Omar al-Mukhtar Street in western Gaza City, the six-storey structure is now ringed by rubble, its windows gaping, its walls speckled with shrapnel. What remains inside is not just a roof and walls, but a rotating cast of families displaced by a conflict that never quite leaves the horizon.
displaced families, shared histories
Eight of the ten apartments in the Skeik building have become temporary homes for people who fled danger in their own neighborhoods. The families we spoke with describe a brutal, repetitive cycle: move, shelter, move again. The common thread is not simply shelter, but the erosion of ties that once bound people to a place, a street, a collective memory.
Hadeel Daban’s fragile routine
Twenty-six-year-old Hadeel Daban lives on the fourth floor with her husband and three children. They pay 1,000 shekels a month to occupy a former storeroom turned lean-to for the time being. “Shrapnel hits the walls here, but it’s still better than a tent,” she says. The family’s belongings sit in bags along the walls; holes where windows used to be are covered with torn sheets. Their move is the twelfth since the war began, and their home lies less than a mile from Gaza City’s al-Tuffah neighborhood—where their house was destroyed in the first weeks of the conflict.
Hadeel’s husband was critically injured in a strike that also killed her mother-in-law. The couple’s long road to recovery has been punctuated by hospital lockdowns and evacuations as violence raged around al-Shifa hospital. Still, she speaks softly of routine medical visits and a life not quite rebuilt, yet not fully relinquished to loss.
Grandmothers and grandchildren amid the rubble
On the fifth floor, Muna Amin Shabet’s family lives among bullet holes that punctuate the walls. Her grandchildren draw a hopeful scene—a small house with a red tile roof, trees and a pink-blue sky. The contrast between the children’s drawing and the stark reality outside reveals the human longing that persists amid devastation. Muna’s family had four of their five sons and much of their extended network scatter to the south or stay with relatives. She laments that the extended family she once relied on is unraveling, and her health has suffered as a result of the strain and dislocation.
Becoming strangers to one another
Shawkat al-Ansari’s account mirrors that of many others in the building: a brother missing after he went to fetch flour for relatives in a neighboring area; a household where children once thriving in school now struggle with disrupted routines. The constant churn of people moving for food, safety, or shelter makes it nearly impossible to preserve community bonds. “We were living OK before, now my brother is missing, and we’re all stranded in different places,” Shawkat reflects, underscoring a broader truth: in Gaza, home is as much about people as it is about walls.
Home as a fragile concept
The Skeik building is a microcosm for a city where UN figures suggest that a vast majority of housing has suffered or been destroyed. The architecture remains, but the social fabric—neighbors who know one another, communal routines, shared memories—has been ripped apart. In this environment, a home is no longer a place one returns to; it is a place one survives in, often with new people, new routines, and new uncertainties.
Looking toward an uncertain horizon
As Gaza’s battles persist, the residents of Skeik live with the knowledge that today’s shelter may be tomorrow’s ruin. Yet the stories told by Hadeel, Muna, Shawkat, and others are not only about loss. They are also a testimony to resilience—the instinct to preserve memory, to nurture children, and to cling to a sense of home even when the walls crumble around them. If negotiations lead to peace and reconstruction, it could open a path back to something resembling a shared past. Until then, these families navigate a future written in concrete, dust, and the stubborn endurance of everyday life.
Additional reporting by Aamir Peerzada and Gaza colleagues. Design by the BBC’s Visual Journalism team.
