MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
People in Gaza are living in tents or unsteady bombed-out buildings. On Wednesday, one of those buildings collapsed. It had about a hundred people inside. Gaza's rescue crews pulled 21 bodies out of the rubble and say dozens of people were wounded. NPR's Aya Batrawy in Dubai and NPR's Anas Baba in Gaza bring us this next report on how Gaza's 2 million residents have nowhere safe to live.
NOOR AL-JAABARI: (Speaking Arabic).
AYA BATRAWY, BYLINE: That's Noor al-Jaabari, 17 years old. She has scratches on her forehead and bruises on her body, and she's visibly shaken. Al-Jaabari says it was 2 in the morning when she suddenly found herself trapped beneath concrete.
AL-JAABARI: (Speaking Arabic).
BATRAWY: She says her grandfather, grandmother, aunts and the families living below them were killed when the six-story building collapsed. This is one of at least 200,000 buildings in Gaza the U.N. says were damaged or destroyed by Israeli airstrikes in two years of war. NPR's Anas Baba describes what it's like walking the streets of Gaza City.
(CROSSTALK)
ANAS BABA, BYLINE: When you look to your right, when you look to your left, buildings that survived the Israeli airstrikes and the military operation are heavily damaged. Families have stretched, like, blue and white plastic traps to protect them from winds.
BATRAWY: Al-Jaabari says her grandfather knew their building could collapse. They could see its cracks and holes. But the family agreed it was better than the makeshift tent they'd been living in, which feels like a furnace in the summer and floods in the winter. Like thousands of Palestinian families in Gaza today who have no other choice, they lived in the bombed-out building so they could sleep with a roof over their head. Here's NPR's reporter in Gaza at the site of the collapsed building Wednesday.
(SOUNDBITE OF SHOVELING RUBBLE)
BABA: When you look at it, what I can see here is that the floors have pancaked. You can see that one slab on top of the other. The pile is maybe 30 feet high. There is twisted steel, shattered tiles. It collapsed while everyone was sleeping. Since then, rescue crews have been digging mostly with their hands. And after 16 hours of nonstop work to reach the trapped people, they have pulled 20 bodies from under the debris, among them, nine children and six women. The youngest was 1-year-old baby - died between his mother arm. And the oldest was a 65-year-old woman.
(SOUNDBITE OF RUBBLE CLATTERING)
BATRAWY: The Norwegian Refugee Council, or NRC, which manages shelter supplies in Gaza, says there are hundreds of buildings like this one, assessed to be unsafe but still inhabited. But the NRC and other aid groups say Israel repeatedly turns away shelter and repair materials, even those Israel's military coordination body, COGAT, has approved for entry. COGAT says it's coordinating the entry of shelter and winter supplies to help people in Gaza prepare for the upcoming colder months and that it's working with aid groups to ensure it reaches civilians and not Hamas. The NRC gives an example as recently as this month, though, of COGAT approving nearly 37,000 pieces of timber and hundreds of emergency shelter kits, only to later reject their entry. Aya Batrawy, NPR News, Dubai, with Anas Baba in Gaza City. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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