The China Mail - Israel army hit Gaza mosque, says used for Hamas 'weapons storage'

AFP photos from Gaza City on Tuesday showed fire and a huge plume of smoke rising above tents housing displaced Gazans during a strike on the Al-Muttaqin Mosque.

Palestinians could be seen combing through vast piles of rubble and debris in the aftermath of the attack.

"Over the past week, the (Israeli military) struck and dismantled several Hamas weapons storage facilities in the central and northern Gaza Strip," the military said.

"One of the storage facilities had been established inside a mosque in the northern Gaza Strip," it added, saying advance warnings were given to civilians.

A fragile ceasefire remains in place between Israel and Palestinian militant group Hamas, but it has not halted the violence in the Gaza Strip, where 1,207 people were killed since the truce began in October 2025.

Israeli fire continues to regularly target Palestinians the military says are militants, while efforts to secure a lasting agreement to end the war have stalled.

AFP footage showed dozens of Palestinians evacuating the area before the mosque was hit.

"Is this a ceasefire? Every day there are attacks, every hour, every breath. There are attacks everywhere. They threaten and strike, whether it's civilian vehicles or anything else they bomb," Shehadeh Badawi, an eyewitness, told AFP in the aftermath.

Amir Abu Al-Amrain, the director general of the ministry of awqaf and religious affairs in the Gaza Strip, said Israeli forces had "completely destroyed" the mosque in the airstrike.

"The occupation cites false pretexts -- such as the alleged presence of military sites -- to justify these crimes," he said, calling for urgent intervention to protect mosques and places of worship.

As of March 24, 2026, the UN's cultural agency UNESCO had verified damage to 164 sites since the start of the Gaza war triggered by Hamas's October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.

Fourteen of those are religious sites.

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