Reporter
October 19, 2025
A mosque destroyed by an airstrike in Gaza. Doc. Shutterstock
TEMPO.CO, Jakarta – Thousands of worshipers filled several mosques in the Gaza Strip to perform the Friday Prayers on October 17, 2025. Some mosques are still intact, but many have been damaged due to Israeli attacks.
For the first time in several months, the call to prayer, or Adhan, echoed through the loudspeakers. The call resounded in the mosques at almost the same time on Friday, a week after the ceasefire took place in the coastal area of Palestine, which is inhabited by devout Muslim residents.
To be united for prayer again “is an indescribable feeling after two years of privation,” Ghalid al-Nimra at the Sayed Hachem mosque in Gaza City said as reported by Free Malaysia Today.
Sayed Hachem, one of the oldest mosques in the largest city in Gaza, miraculously survived most of the airstrikes and the two-year conflict between Israel and Hamas. While witnessing hundreds of worshipers, Nimra was touched to see a large congregation gathered for the first time since the outbreak of war between Hamas and Israel on October 7, 2023.
As the prayer was recited at 12:30 p.m., many people hurriedly passed through the gates of the Ottoman-era building. Old and young, many with solemn faces, prayed together inside, where even the pulpit, the elevated place for the imam, appeared intact. According to the Hamas media office in the Palestinian territory, out of 1,244 mosques in Gaza, 1,160 were partially or completely destroyed.
Some worshipers expressed confusion. “I feel like my soul is getting lost amid all this destruction,” said Abu Mahmud Salha. The 52-year-old man from northern Gaza is still living in a displacement camp in Al-Mawasi, at the other end of the Gaza Strip.
“We pray inside the tent, I miss group prayer and the imam’s voice,” he said. “When I hear the prayer call echoing on loudspeakers from recordings, I feel like a part of our lives was broken.”
Mosques in his neighborhood, al-Falluja, were destroyed, so he has been forced to pray on the street.
On Fridays, most people still maintain the habits they have developed over the past several months. Some lay their prayer rugs on the streets, on rubble, or in mosques with crumbling walls. Others bow down near rows of tents that house thousands of displaced Palestinian residents in Gaza, living in difficult conditions.
“Every Friday, we try to gather on a small patch of land under the sky, to pray,” said Moataz Abu Sharbi. “Sometimes we pray on sand or on pieces of cardboard, which is very difficult psychologically,” said the 27-year-old man.
“The mosque was a pillar of life in our neighborhoods and a precious part of our religious traditions,” said Abu Sharbi, who has been displaced to the city of Deir al-Balah in central Gaza. “Losing both one’s home and one’s spiritual refuge — that’s the hardest part,” added Abu Sharbi.
source Gaza’s Surviving Mosques Host First Friday Prayer After Ceasefire – World En.tempo.co
Categories: Arab World, Gaza, Palestine, War, War crimes