Published On 9/7/2026
23 Israeli military sites armed with observation towers and cranes surround the details of the daily lives of the displaced people of the Gaza Strip and control their fate.
In a report he prepared for Al Jazeera, Shadi Shamiya documented a harsh field and humanitarian scene, revealing the transformation of these structures from monitoring tools into platforms for liquidation and direct random killing targeting civilians in the smallest details of their displacement.
The human rights data issued by the Palestinian Center for Human Rights shows a strict military pattern based on the occupation’s deployment of 23 sites that include military cranes distributed in the Gaza Strip.
These towers, designed primarily for field targeting and monitoring, have stripped the refugee tents of any ability to protect, and are now imposing a 24-hour psychological and physical siege by firing bullets and shells whose sound does not stop, turning the residents’ livelihood into a daily journey of postponed death.
This death transmitted by the towers is accurately embodied in the testimonies of the displaced. In the same spot where the children were playing, citizen Ghassan’s child was martyred before his eyes. The father lived the experience of “death 100 times” as he tried to cram his children and wife into a narrow corner behind the tent to avoid the continuous bullets.
This horror is no different from the case of citizen Hoda Maqat, whose tent was pierced by bullets, threatening the life of her little one. She is experiencing a family catastrophe in which she has already lost three of her members, while the fourth suffered an amputation in her foot. Her greatest fear remains the loss of another child amid the complete absence of any helper.
Systematic human destruction
From a field and medical perspective, these towers go beyond the idea of military deterrence to cause systematic human destruction, as the testimonies of ambulance crews intersect with human rights reports to confirm that the bullets of Israeli cranes are concentrated in killing.
Director of Ambulance and Emergency Services at the Medical Services, Fares Afaneh, explains that the nature of the injuries is specifically concentrated in the upper parts of the body, such as the chest, head, and neck.
This direct and indiscriminate targeting resulted in large numbers of martyrs, in addition to causing complete paralysis of some of the injured.
The field scene in Gaza concludes that the widespread Israeli towers have redefined the geography of the Strip. They are no longer merely observation points, but have become a permanent danger and a killing tool closely linked to the details of civilians’ daily lives, claiming their lives without warning and leaving indelible psychological and physical scars.
Since the truce between the Israeli occupation and the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) entered into force last October, Israeli forces have expanded their deployment inside the Gaza Strip, and control about 70% of its territory, according to a statement by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the end of last June.
Since the start of the Israeli genocidal war on the Gaza Strip in October 2023, more than 73,000 Palestinians have been martyred, and more than 173,000 have been injured, in addition to widespread destruction that affected about 90% of the civilian infrastructure.
