Gazans return to damaged mosques for first post-truce Friday prayers
Thousands of worshippers returned on Friday to the Gaza Strip’s few intact and many damaged mosques, where for the first time in months loudspeakers blared the Islamic call to prayer.
The call echoed through mosques at roughly the same time Friday, one week after a ceasefire took place in the devoutly Muslim coastal Palestinian territory.
To be united for prayer again “is an indescribable feeling after two years of privation”, Ghalid al-Nimra told AFP at Gaza City’s Sayed Hachem mosque.
Sayed Hachem, one of the oldest mosques in Gaza’s largest city, was miraculously mostly spared during two years of air strikes and fighting between Israel and Hamas.
As he watched the hundreds of worshippers, Nimra was moved to see “such a large crowd gathered here” for the first time since Hamas’s Oct 7, 2023 attack…
