Hamas announced that four people were killed on Sunday in an Israeli bombardment that, once again, targeted a school hosting displaced persons, while the Israeli army said it had hit “terrorists”.

“Another day. Another month. Another bombed school,” Filipe Lazzarini, the commissioner-general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), complained via X.

A civil protection spokesman in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip announced that “Ihab al-Hussein, deputy minister of labor, is among the people killed in the Israeli bombardment,” adding that a school run by the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem in the city had been targeted. of Gaza.

The Catholic Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem expressed its “intense concern” late last Sunday night in a statement, underlining that this school “since the beginning of the war has been a place where hundreds of civilians have taken refuge” and that “no member of the clergy resided there ».

The patriarchate “condemns in the strongest possible way the targeting of civilians” and “any action that does not guarantee” the protection of civilians, the statement added.

The Israeli armed forces said in a statement that “terrorists” were hiding in the school and that it also housed a “Hamas weapons factory”.

The airstrike came a day after Hamas said sixteen people had been killed in an Israeli bombardment of a UN-run school sheltering thousands of displaced people. The Palestinian Islamist movement denounced this “heinous massacre”.

For its part, Israel’s military said the air force targeted “many terrorists” in the “UNRWA al-Zauni school sector”.

“This location was used to hide weapons and as an operational infrastructure from which attacks were carried out against (Israeli) military personnel,” he claimed in a statement, adding that he had taken “many measures to reduce the risk of civilian casualties.”

Hamas has repeatedly denied Israeli accusations that its fighters are hiding in civilian infrastructure.

The vast majority of the Gaza Strip’s 2.4 million residents have been repeatedly displaced by the armed conflict, which entered its tenth month on Sunday, with many taking refuge in schools run by the United Nations.

Nearly 190 facilities managed by UNRWA have been bombed since the war broke out, with damage in some cases “unprecedented in the history of the UN,” agency spokeswoman Juliette Touma told AFP. “Every strike against UN facilities is shocking” and a demonstration of “absolute contempt for international humanitarian law,” he said.

“When the war started, we closed schools and they turned into shelters,” he recalled.

At the latest count (as of Thursday), “194 UNRWA workers have been killed.”

Yesterday Saturday, the agency announced that two of its workers were killed in al-Bureij, in the central Gaza Strip.