1,244 of Gaza's 1,275 mosques damaged or destroyed, office says
Gaza's government media office puts the number levelled outright at 1,077, says water installations are being taken apart along with the rest of the territory's civilian infrastructure, and asks the mediators to enforce the ceasefire they underwrote.
Gaza's Government Media Office said on Tuesday that Israeli attacks have struck 1,244 of the 1,275 mosques standing in the territory, and that 1,077 of those were levelled outright. On its count, fewer than one mosque in forty has come through untouched.
The office set the figure inside a wider charge: that what is being dismantled in Gaza is the basis of ordinary life rather than a set of military targets. It named water installations in particular, alongside homes, places of worship and the civilian infrastructure that supplies them.
It also put the number of Palestinian children killed since the fighting began at more than 21,500 — its own tally, kept separately from the Ministry of Health's daily bulletins.
Attacks on residential areas have continued through the ceasefire, the office said, including strikes on houses sheltering displaced families as well as residents who never left. It described these as repeated breaches of the agreement, and held both Israel and the international community answerable for what it called the legal, moral and historical consequences.
Its demand was addressed to the states that brokered the truce rather than to the party it accuses. It asked the mediators for firm and practical measures to raise the pressure until the agreement is carried out in full, and for urgent protection for civilians — children first — and for mosques and the civilian services around them.
It was issued a day after a run of Israeli attacks across the Strip that hospital sources said had killed eight Palestinians, among them children, with rescue and civil defence crews still working through damaged buildings. Fresh evacuation orders were issued for parts of central Gaza over the same period.
A tally of destroyed mosques is a slower kind of accounting than a casualty figure, and it measures something a daily toll cannot. Places of worship are where a neighbourhood assembles, buries its dead and shelters when there is nowhere else; 1,077 of them gone is a count of communities that no longer have a centre to return to.