GAZA — For a decade, Palestinian bank worker Shady Salama Al-Rayyes paid into a $93,000 mortgage on his apartment in a tall, modern block in one of Gaza City’s prime neighborhoods. Now, he and his family are destitute, after fleeing an Israeli strike that collapsed the building in a cloud of black smoke and dust.

The Israel Defense Forces said the 15-storey Mushtaha Tower was destroyed because it was being used by Hamas as operational infrastructure, including underground facilities that were utilized to plan attacks, stage ambushes against IDF forces and provide escape routes for terror operatives.

The September 5 strike came ahead of Israel’s ground offensive towards the heart of the densely populated city, which started this week.

Over the past two weeks, the IDF said it has demolished up to 20 Gaza City tower blocks used by Hamas. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said 50 “terrorist towers” had been demolished.

The campaign has made hundreds of people homeless. In a similar time frame, Israeli forces have flattened areas in the city’s Zeitoun, Tuffah, Shejaiya and Sheikh al-Radwan neighborhoods, among others, residents told Reuters. The damage since August to scores of buildings in Sheikh al-Radwan was visible in satellite imagery reviewed by the news agency.

Al-Rayyes said he feared the destruction was aimed at permanently clearing the population from Gaza City, a view shared by the UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR). Its spokesperson Thameen Al-Kheetan said in a statement that such a deliberate effort to relocate the population would be tantamount to ethnic cleansing.

Israel has insisted its push for civilians to evacuate Gaza City is entirely for their own safety, as it expects to enter the heart of the dense town with great force to root out remaining Hamas fighters. Ahead of the offensive, the IDF repeatedly called on the one million Palestinians estimated to be residing in all areas of Gaza City to evacuate immediately to an Israeli-designated humanitarian zone in the Strip’s south. Some half are thought to have done so thus far.

“I never thought I would leave Gaza City, but the explosions are non-stop,” Al-Rayyes said on Wednesday. “I can’t risk the safety of my children, so I am packing up and will leave for the south.”

Al-Rayyes vowed, however, never to leave Gaza entirely.

Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said in May that most of Gaza would soon be “totally destroyed” and the population confined to a narrow strip of land near the border with Egypt, and has repeatedly spoken of his desire to push the local population out and rebuild Jewish settlements in their stead. Netanyahu has insisted there are no such plans.

In response to questions for this story, military spokesperson Lieutenant-Colonel Nadav Shoshani said “there’s no strategy to flatten Gaza.” He said the military’s aim was to destroy Hamas and bring hostages home.

Tall buildings were used by Hamas to observe and attack Israeli forces, he said, adding that the terror group used civilians as human shields and also put booby-traps in buildings. Soldiers are regularly killed by IEDs in Gaza.

Hamas has denied using residential towers to attack Israeli forces.

Shoshani added that the buildings were legitimate military targets approved by an intelligence officer and a legal officer.

The goals of the military and politicians are not always aligned, two security sources told Reuters, with one citing far-right notions of clearing Palestinians from areas of Gaza for future redevelopment as diverging from military goals. The Prime Minister’s Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The offensive is the latest phase in the war in Gaza, launched in response to the Hamas-led attacks on October 7, 2023, that killed some 1,200 people and saw 251  taken hostage. Terror groups in the Gaza Strip are now holding 48 hostages. They include the bodies of at least 26 confirmed dead by the IDF. Twenty are believed to be alive and there are grave concerns for the well-being of two others, officials have said.

The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 65,000 people in the Strip have been killed or are presumed dead in the fighting so far, though the toll cannot be verified and does not differentiate between civilians and fighters. Israel says it has killed over 22,000 combatants in battle as of August and another 1,600 terrorists inside Israel during the October 7 onslaught.

Before the war, Mushtaha Tower was popular with Gaza City’s professional class and students drawn to its ocean views and convenient location near a public park and two universities.

It originally housed about 50 families, but that number had tripled in recent months as people took in relatives displaced from other parts of Gaza, said Al-Rayyes.

Scores of tents housing more displaced families had spread around the tower’s base. Upper floors of the building had been damaged by previous strikes.

On the morning of September 5, a neighbor got a call from an army officer instructing him to spread the word to evacuate the building within minutes or they were “going to bring it down on our heads,” Al-Rayyes said.

Reuters could not independently verify his account of the evacuation order. It is consistent with accounts of residents of other buildings ahead of Israeli strikes. Shoshani said the military gave residents time to evacuate and ensured civilians had left before hitting the buildings.

“Panic, fear, confusion, loss, despair and pain overwhelmed all of us. I saw people running on our bare feet; some didn’t even take their mobile phones or documents. I didn’t take passports or identity cards,” said Al-Rayyes, who had once hoped to pay off his mortgage by this year.

“We carried nothing with us, my wife and my two children, Adam, 9, and Shahd, 11, climbed down the stairs and ran away.”

Videos showed what happened next. From the air, two projectiles exploded almost simultaneously into the base of the tower, demolishing it in around six seconds. Dust, smoke and debris billowed over the streets and tents of displaced people, who scattered, running and screaming.

In response to a question from Reuters, the military said Hamas had “underground infrastructure” beneath Mushtaha Tower that it used to attack soldiers. The military declined a request to provide evidence.

In a response to Reuters on Wednesday, the UN’s OHCHR said the military had also not provided it with evidence to demonstrate that other buildings described as terrorist infrastructure were valid military targets.

Al-Rayyes, who headed the building’s residents’ association, said the tactic of demolition “makes no sense,” even if there was a Hamas presence, which he denied.

“They could have dealt with it in a way that doesn’t even scratch people, not to destroy a 16-floor building,” he said, using a different count of its height.

After a couple of weeks with family in the city’s Sabra district, Al-Rayyes has left, like hundreds of thousands of other residents of the city since August, and was setting up a tent in central Gaza’s Deir Al-Balah on Thursday.

In preparation for the ground offensive, in recent weeks, up to a dozen homes have been destroyed daily in Zeitoun, Tuffah and Shejaia, the residents Reuters spoke to said.

Amjad Al-Shawa, head of the Palestinian Local NGOs Network, estimated that over 65% of buildings and homes in Gaza City had been destroyed or heavily damaged during the war. Extensive damage to suburban areas in recent weeks is visible in satellite images of several neighborhoods.

The Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED), a non-profit organization that gathers data on conflicts around the world, documented over 170 demolition incidents carried out by the IDF in Gaza City since early August, mainly through controlled explosions in eastern areas as well as Zeitoun and Sabra.

“The pace and extent of demolitions appear more extensive than in previous periods,” ACLED’s Senior Middle East analyst Ameneh Mehvar told Reuters. By comparison, she said fewer than 160 such demolitions were recorded in Gaza City during the first 15 months of the war.

The residents who spoke to Reuters also reported the military had blown up remotely driven vehicles laden with explosives in the Sheikh Radwan and Tel Al-Hawa neighborhoods, destroying many houses in the past two weeks.

During the war, the IDF has repurposed decommissioned APCs by packing them with explosives and attaching remote-control capabilities in order to drive them into areas with Hamas infrastructure without risking the lives of troops. The massive blasts from the APCs are used to destroy Hamas infrastructure, including booby-trapped areas.

The UN’s OHCHR said it had documented controlled demolition of residential infrastructure, saying some entire neighborhoods were destroyed.

Even before the current offensive on Gaza City, almost 80% of buildings in Gaza — roughly 247,195 structures — had been damaged or destroyed since the war started, according to the latest data from the United Nations Satellite Centre, gathered in July. This included 213 hospitals and 1,029 schools.

Bushra Khalidi, who leads policy on Gaza at Oxfam, said tower blocks were one of the last forms of shelter, and warned that pushing people out would “exponentially” worsen overcrowding in the south.

Tareq Abdel-Al, a 23-year-old student of finance from Sabra, was hesitant to leave his home with his extended family despite weeks of bombardment in the area, exhausted from being ordered to evacuate so many times in the war, he said. They left on the morning of August 19, only after houses neighboring their 3-storey home were demolished.

Just 12 hours later, a strike destroyed the family home, he said.

“Should we have stayed, we might have been killed that night,” Abdel-Al told Reuters by phone from Nuseirat camp in central Gaza, describing extensive damage to the whole street. “They destroyed our hope of returning.”