A Cairo building collapse has killed six people, three of them children, after rescuers spent a full day searching the rubble of a five-storey block.
The block gave way on Tuesday on Al-Khaleej Street, in the Hadayek El-Qobba district. Rescuers were still combing the debris on Wednesday for anyone who might be trapped.
Ahram Online reported that civil defence teams recovered the bodies of three children and three adults. Seven injured people, one of them a child, were taken to Al-Zaitoun Hospital.
The first reports of the Cairo building collapse on Tuesday carried some hope. Cairo Governorate said six people had been rescued, while Governor Ibrahim Saber and the city’s security director, Mohamed Youssef, oversaw the operation. The Egyptian Red Crescent sent teams to support civil defence crews and ambulance staff.
Officials say the search will continue until the final number of casualties is confirmed.
The building was old. In a statement, Cairo Governorate said it dated from the 1950s, with a ground floor and four upper floors supported by load-bearing walls. In a structure like that, the walls do the job that columns and beams do in a modern frame.
Authorities have begun legal proceedings, but nobody has said publicly what caused the Cairo building collapse. Gulf News reported that investigators will examine the building’s structural records. They will also check whether any repair or demolition orders had been issued, and whether anyone enforced them.
Neighbouring buildings have been evacuated, and temporary steel supports are going up to hold them steady.
That matters because Hadayek El-Qobba has seen a Cairo building collapse before.
In July 2023, a five-storey block in the same district came down and killed at least 12 people. The governor at the time, Khaled Abdel Aal, said a resident had removed a load-bearing wall to enlarge his flat. The man was arrested.
In September 2023, another building fell in the district and four people died. Egypt’s statistics agency counted it as the seventh collapse in Cairo in two months.
Then, in August this year, Gulf News reported that four more people died when an old residential building collapsed in the same neighbourhood. Five others were injured.
By our count, Tuesday’s Cairo building collapse is at least the fourth deadly one in the district since July 2023. Each had its own circumstances, and nothing so far links them. Even so, four in just over three years is a record that demands an explanation.
The problem is also national. A census in 2017 identified nearly 98,000 buildings at risk of collapse.
Authorities have since pushed a crackdown on illegal construction and moved some families out of unsafe buildings. Yet a block more than 60 years old was still home to families on Tuesday, and it fell all the same.
Whatever the inquiry finds about the Cairo building collapse on Al-Khaleej Street, it will not bring back the children.
The rubble will be cleared within days. The harder job is counting how many buildings like it are still standing, and who is checking on them.
