The European Union on Sunday urged Israel's military and the Palestinian group Hamas to "immediately stop" their hostilities over Gaza, and condemned the large loss of life in the conflict, as Britain said the situation in the war-battered enclave is “intolerable.”

"The bloodshed needs to stop," said a statement signed by the EU and European Commission presidents on behalf of the bloc's 28 member states.

Ask any child in Gaza to do a drawing and the resulting picture is likely to be a house being bombed by a fighter plane.

In the strife-torn Palestinian enclave, thousands of children are suffering from the trauma of war but resources to help them are scarce.

A Hamas team arrived in Cairo on Sunday for talks with Egyptian mediators on a possible truce in Gaza, an airport official and state news agency MENA said.

The delegation is led by senior Hamas official Ezzat al-Rishq, the sources said.

Thousands of protesters, many wrapped in Palestinian flags, rallied outside the White House on Saturday to call for peace and an end to the fighting in Gaza.

The crowd, young and old from across the United States, including scores of children on parents' shoulders, chanted "End U.S. Aid to Israel" and "Israel out of Palestine."

The U.N. expressed outrage after another deadly strike on one of its schools Sunday as Israel began pulling some troops from Gaza in a widely-acknowledged step towards unilateral withdrawal.

The strike killed 10 people at a school in the southern city of Rafah where around 3,000 Palestinians who had been made homeless by the violence had been sheltering, in the third such incident within 10 days. 

A senior Palestinian delegation arrived in Cairo on Saturday to discuss a truce in the Gaza Strip, even though Israel has said it would not send representatives for the talks.

The Palestinian delegation, which included the Palestinian Authority's spy chief Majid Faraj, will be joined by Hamas representatives and meet Egyptian officials on Sunday.

Thousands of people took to the streets in several cities across France on Saturday to protest Israel's deadly offensive in the Gaza Strip.

"Israel murderer, Hollande partner in crime," shouted demonstrators at a rally in Paris, while others gathered in several cities throughout the country, including Marseille, Lyon and Lille, to voice their support for the Palestinians.

At least 296 Palestinian children and adolescents have been killed since Israel launched its offensive in the Gaza Strip against Hamas on July 8, the U.N. said on Saturday.

"Children make up for 30 percent of the civilian casualties," said the U.N. children's agency UNICEF, adding that the toll was based on deaths which it was able to verify and was likely to rise.

Hizbullah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah held talks on Saturday with Marada Movement leader MP Suleiman Franjieh, and both men discussed the situation in the country and the region.

Nasrallah and Franjieh gave special attention to the ongoing war on the Gaza Strip and underscored the “exodus of Christians and the killing of Muslims" in the Iraq's Mosul, a statement published on Marada's official website revealed.

Unlike many Palestinians who are desperate to flee Gaza, Rami and Osama had no choice but to return after years in Israeli jails, although the scope of the devastation has shocked them.

At the Erez border crossing, a vast military-style hangar, the two young men with cropped dark hair look rather lost as nearby Israeli tanks fire into Gaza.