“The Gaza Towers are not inanimate objects, they feel and die, and they take with them our wealth, many memories and some hope,” conversations mixed with pain and sadness of the residents of towers and homes that were razed to the ground by Israeli air strikes that threw them outside, carrying nothing but the clothes on their bodies.

3 multi-layered towers and hundreds of homes, residential and commercial apartments collapsed after the occupation aircraft threw their lava on them, and became a rubble buried beneath the properties and memories of families who became homeless, and companies were destroyed and suffered heavy losses.

The occupation did not give the residents time even to leave the houses with the least amount of money, but rather they left only with their clothes that they are wearing (Reuters)

Home is life

Ayman Dahman does not believe until this moment that he lost his apartment with all his memories and possessions in a "brutal moment". His family of 6 raced to leave for their lives before the occupation missiles hit the residential building in which he resides in northern Gaza City.

"We left the building, racing against time, as the occupation forces gave us only 5 minutes to leave before the bombing," he tells Al-Jazeera Net.

Dahman lives in a 5-storey residential building inhabited by 10 families. "It is not just an apartment. In every corner of it we have a memory and a story," he said.

The owner of Al-Jawhara Towers in Gaza, Ahmed Al-Zaeem and his family, looks out to the world with a smile in front of their destroyed tower (communication sites)

He paused for a moment, then added, "With the blink of an eye, we found ourselves on the street, possessing nothing but our clothes to wear, and all that we had and what we spent our years building, even our identity papers, school and university certificates, and our children's clothes for Eid, everything has become a thing of the past."

Dahman found nothing in front of him but to seek refuge with his family to the house of his son, who lives in a rented apartment consisting of two small rooms.

After the dust had settled, Dahman returned the next day to inspect the place, to be shocked and grieved, and began to ask himself the question and repeat it, "Did I live here?", And he hardly believed what his eyes could see.

A few days before the bombing, Dahman made updates to his apartment, replaced the furniture, bought Eid clothes for his children, and said, "The house is not just stones and walls, it is the kingdom of man. There is no feeling of comfort and safety except inside your house, and the material loss is painful, but the psychological pain remains more severe and greater." ".

Residents of Gaza and its youth have lost their investment and the start-up companies that they founded in these (European) towers

Dream collapse

Among the large number of commercial establishments in the "Hanadi Tower", the young man in his thirties, Muhammad Qaddada, lost his advertising marketing company, which collapsed with the 13-storey tower, which is the first to be subjected to an Israeli air strike during the current war on Gaza.

Muhammad and 30 employees were conducting their work in the company before the tower received a bombing warning, but the time given to them was not enough to evacuate the devices and equipment, so they left them to be engulfed in fire, and he tells Al-Jazeera Net, "Our losses are not only direct, but also indirect .. The work archive since the company was founded 6 years ago, and a lot of memories. "

He adds that he founded the company part by part, "I used to watch her grow up day after day as if she were my little child. I spent a lot of time at work and hoped for a better and more beautiful future, so that everything collapsed with the push of a button from an aggressive pilot."

For a whole day after the bombing, Muhammad lived under the influence of shock, and he did not want to believe what happened. He watched again and again video clips of the tower crashing to the ground and columns of black smoke rising from it due to the violent air strikes that targeted him.

After Muhammad awoke from the shock, he and the rest of the employees switched to work from their homes via the Internet. "We will rebuild and hold on to hope as long as we can," he says.

The buildings became a relic after an eye, as well as many dreams of Gazans (Anatolia)

Energetic towers

In addition to Hanadi Tower, two other towers were bombed, namely “Al-Shorouk” and “Al-Jawhara,” and all three of them are distinguished by their location in vital places in Gaza City, the largest city in the Gaza Strip, and include with smaller buildings that were destroyed hundreds of commercial companies ’headquarters.

The official in the Gaza Chamber of Experts, Dr. Maher Al-Tabaa, estimates the direct losses resulting from the targeting of the commercial towers specifically in the tens of millions of dollars, in addition to the losses incurred by the infrastructure and dozens of small and medium-sized shops within the scope of the targeting circle.

Al-Tabaa told Al-Jazeera Net that the bombing of the towers will have serious negative repercussions on the fragile Gaza economy, and the greater impact of this will appear in the high rates of unemployment and poverty after the war ends.