Israel’s unlawful and wanton destruction of civilian high-rise buildings continues to have devastating consequences for displaced Palestinian families in the occupied Gaza Strip, where reconstruction remains a distant dream amid ongoing genocide and air strikes despite the October 2025 so-called ceasefire, said Amnesty International today.
To illustrate the gravity of the wanton destruction that Israeli forces have wreaked on Gaza, Amnesty International today releases an investigation of the Israeli military’s levelling of at least 13 multi-storey residential and commercial buildings across Gaza City between September and October 2025. The organization found that the Israeli military severely damaged and destroyed the high-rise buildings, which housed thousands of people – many of them internally displaced – by dropping multiple bombs on each building after forcing residents to leave with almost no notice, and called them to be investigated as the war crimes of wanton destruction, collective punishment and direct attacks on civilian objects.
Statements by Israel’s Defence Minister Israel Katz in the immediate aftermath of some of the incidents of destruction offer further evidence that the buildings were not destroyed for reasons of imperative military necessity but rather to inflict collective punishment and widespread devastation on the civilian population as means of exerting political pressure on Hamas and as part of a mass forced displacement campaign.
