Several children killed following Gaza air strikes
AN Israeli air raid in Gaza City has killed at least 10 Palestinians, mostly children, in the deadliest single strike since the battle with Gaza’s militant Hamas rulers erupted earlier this week.
Both sides pressed for an advantage as efforts to bring about a ceasefire gathered strength.
The latest outburst of violence began in Jerusalem and has spread across the region, with Jewish-Arab clashes and rioting in mixed cities of Israel.
There were also widespread Palestinian protests on Friday in the occupied West Bank, where Israeli forces shot and killed 11 people.
The spiralling violence has raised fears of a new Palestinian “intifada”, or uprising, at a time when there have been no peace talks in years.
Palestinians marked Nakba day on Saturday, when they commemorated the estimated 700,000 people who fled or were driven from their homes in what is now Israel during the 1948 war surrounding its creation, raising the possibility of more unrest.
US diplomat Hady Amr arrived in the region on Friday as part of Washington’s efforts to de-escalate the conflict, and the UN Security Council is also set to meet on Sunday.
But Israel turned down an Egyptian proposal for a one-year truce that Gaza’s militant Hamas rulers had accepted, according to an Egyptian source.
Since Monday night, Hamas has fired hundreds of rockets into Israel, whose military responded by pounding the Gaza Strip with strikes.
In Gaza, at least 126 people have been killed, including 31 children and 20 women. In Israel, seven people have been killed, including a six-year-old boy and a soldier.
Rocket fire from Gaza and Israel’s bombardment of the blockaded Palestinian territory continued into Saturday, when an air strike on a three-storey house in a refugee camp in Gaza City killed eight children and two women from an extended family – the highest number of fatalities in a single hit.
Mohammed Hadidi told reporters his wife and five children had gone to celebrate the Eid al-Fitr holiday with relatives.
She and three of the children, aged between six and 14, were killed, while an 11-year-old is missing. Only his five-month-old son Omar is known to have survived.
Shortly afterwards, Hamas said it fired a salvo of rockets at southern Israel in response to the air strike.
A furious Israeli barrage early on Friday killed a family of six in their house and sent thousands fleeing to UN-run shelters.
The military said the operation involved 160 warplanes dropping some 80 tonnes of explosives over the course of 40 minutes.