The school in the southern Italian village of San Giuliano di Puglia was shaken to the ground in a strong earthquake on Thursday. The children were enjoying a Halloween party when the 5.9-magnitude quake struck. Two women were killed elsewhere in the town, bringing the death toll to 26. The dead children range in age from three to 10.
Officials said three people -- one possibly a teacher -- were still missing, and that the voices rescuers had heard overnight had gone silent. After going all night without finding a survivor, rescue workers recovered an eight-year-old boy just before dawn, nearly 24 hours after the earthquake rattled southern Italy.
With the latest recovery, crews have managed to pluck a total of 35 children alive from the collapsed school. Hope was diminishing for finding more survivors when the child was pulled out alive on Friday morning."It would be difficult for children to survive in these conditions for this long," civil protection officer Ernesto Angelotti told Reuters as firefighters and policemen dug with their hands through the rubble in temperatures of 6 degrees centigrade (43 degrees Fahrenheit).
Heavy lifting equipment was brought in on Friday to move huge chunks of concrete from areas of the site.CNN's Chris Burns said anger in the village was shown with boos for Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi when he visited the scene on Thursday.
Villagers said they wondered why the school was one of the only buildings to collapse, when other buildings displayed only cracks or minor structural damage. Aerial footage of the neighbourhood showed most other buildings intact except for the school, which was in ruins.
Desperate parents, some shrieking and wailing, held an all-night vigil as they waited for news of their children.But signs of life under the debris of the school fizzled out and hopes receded of finding alive those still missing.
"I will die with him! I will die with him!" shrieked one young mother huddled close to the rescue scene. A man aged in his thirties standing nearby cried "Holy mother! My poor child!" and fainted.
"It's like something out of a war. It's like the town's been bombed," 69-year-old resident Antonio Ieniri told Reuters.Some 100 people were admitted to the hospital in Termoli, and 35 were being treated in Larino, the prefect's office said.
Carolyn Bell, a U.S. Geological Survey spokeswoman, said the magnitude of the quake was 5.9. She said it was centred 70 miles northeast of Naples and 40 miles west of Foggia in southeastern Italy. Sixty-two people -- all students except for four teachers and two janitors -- were at the school when the quake struck at 11:30 a.m. (1030 GMT) on Thursday.
Crews had a hard time getting to the children at first because a bridge collapsed. More than 325 firefighters responded in the hard-hit region northeast of Campobasso. ANSA news agency reported 2,500 people were made homeless in the region. Hospitals in Termoli and Lorino have received patients, some of whom are from the school.
People reported feeling the quake as far away as Naples and other regions, including Campania, Apulia, Abruzzo and parts of Rome. San Giuliano di Puglia is in the Molise region, which is on the Adriatic coast. ANSA said schools were evacuated in at least three towns in the Abruzzo region, as well as in the city of Isernia, about 15 miles from Campobasso.
In 1980, an earthquake in the Naples area killed 2,570 people and left 30,000 homeless in the southern Campania and Basilicata regions.The Campobasso area is far from Sicily's Mount Etna, Europe's largest volcano, which came back to life over the weekend following a series of earthquakes. Volcano specialists say the quakes in Sicily and Campobasso are not related.
--CNN Correspondent Chris Burns, Producer Flavia Taggiasca, and Journalist Delia Gallagher contributed to this report.