Twenty-nine Palestinians were killed on Tuesday in the shelling of a school hosting displaced persons in the southern Gaza Strip, Hamas said, denouncing the action as part of “genocide” perpetrated against it by Israel, whose armed forces are simultaneously continuing their offensive in the north. of the pouch.

The war, now in its 10th month, has seen no respite as new indirect talks are expected to take place in Qatar in the hope of agreeing a ceasefire and the release of hostages held in Gaza.

They are people kidnapped when Hamas’ military arm launched an unprecedented raid on southern Israel on October 7, which Israel retaliated by launching a wide-scale military operation in the Gaza Strip, where the Palestinian Islamist movement has ruled since 2007.

“A shelling hit the entrance of al-Awda school in Abasan, in eastern Khan Yunis” (south) and “there are 29 witnesses,” a medical source at the city’s Nasser Hospital said.

Hamas blamed the bombing on Israel giving the same tally, 29 dead, “mostly children and women”.

“This massacre is the continuation of the crime of genocide committed by the occupation army against our people for the 10th consecutive month,” the Palestinian Islamist movement’s press service complained.

Asked by AFP, the Israeli military said it was verifying reports of the bombing, the fourth school targeted in as many days in the Gaza Strip, a tiny enclave ravaged by shelling and threatened with famine.

Three other schools, which have been turned into shelters for displaced people, have been hit by Israeli shelling since Saturday, killing at least 20, according to Palestinian sources. In these three cases the Israeli armed forces said the targets were “terrorists”, as they often accuse Hamas of “using” civilians as “human shields”.

In the northern part of the enclave, Israeli troops bombarded Gaza City from the air and on the ground, during a major new operation against the military wing of Hamas, designated a terrorist organization by Israel, the US and the EU.

The “most intense” fighting is taking place “in months”, according to Hamas, which Israel has vowed to wipe out after the October 7 attack.

On June 27, the Israeli armed forces began a major ground operation in Shujaya, in the eastern part of Gaza City, before extending it yesterday Monday to central districts, where “tens of thousands of people”, according to the UN, were ordered to leave urgently.

On foot, in cars and carts, Palestinians, mostly women and children, left carrying their few possessions.

“We were displaced to Daraj (Gaza district), then to al-Sifa hospital, then to the ministry headquarters, and now we left at-Tufa (Gaza district). Where are we supposed to go?” Umm Nimr al-Jamal asked. “We ran away for our lives, we didn’t get anything,” he added.

“We have about 350,000 people on the streets again. And, since the start of the war, almost all Gazans have been displaced one, two, three, four or five times, which shows that there is absolutely no safe place” in the enclave, commented the commissioner general of the Office of Relief and Works. of the United Nations for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), Philippe Lazzarini.

In Geneva, ten independent UN experts accused Israel of waging a “starvation campaign” in the Gaza Strip, which they said is leading to the deaths of children. “Israel’s deliberate and targeted campaign of starvation against the Palestinian people is a form of genocidal violence and is leading to starvation throughout the Gaza Strip,” they insisted.

Israel’s permanent mission to the UN in Geneva angrily rejected the accusation.

The raid by Hamas’ military arm in southern Israel on October 7 left 1,195 people dead, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli data. Of the 251 people kidnapped during it, 116 remain hostages in the Gaza Strip, but 42 are believed to be dead, according to the Israeli military.

Israel’s wide-scale military retaliatory operations in the Gaza Strip have so far killed at least 38,243 people, most of them civilians, according to the enclave’s health ministry.

After months of fruitless negotiations, a source familiar with the matter said that CIA chiefs William Burns and Mossad David Barnea are expected in Doha today.

Israel and Hamas continue to be at loggerheads, even though the Palestinian Islamist movement no longer considers declaring a permanent ceasefire a necessary condition for holding negotiations on the release of hostages, according to its official.

Hamas will take part in today’s negotiations, according to a source close to it.

The government of Israel, for its part, declares that in any case it will continue the war until the destruction of Hamas.

On the so-called northern front, Israeli police announced yesterday the death of two people in the occupied Golan Heights due to rockets fired from Lebanon.

Firefights between Israel’s armed forces and Lebanon’s Hezbollah have escalated in recent weeks.

“Nasrallah, if you don’t stop the threats and violence (…) you will go down in history as the destroyer of Lebanon,” Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz shouted, addressing Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in the second person.