Among ruins of bombed city towers, Gazans still reel from shock and pain

Three months on from the devastating conflict, little has been rebuilt of the bombed high-rises that were homes and offices

Four years ago, Jehad Judah was pleased to be able to afford to buy his family a flat in al-Jalaa, a 14-storey building in downtown Gaza City, home to about 700 people as well as lawyers, computer software businesses and journalism bureaus belonging to the Associated Press of the US and Qatar's Al Jazeera.

The 54-year-old bespectacled civil servant spent the first 30 years of his life living in a refugee camp, a jumble of breeze-block housing with poor amenities. After he met his wife in 2001, the couple moved to Gaza to start a family. The Israeli and Egyptian blockade of the strip which came along a few years later made life in the city hard, but al-Jalaa still offered a decent standard of living, he said.