Palestinians inspect a destroyed house after an Israeli air strike in Gaza City yesterday.
Israel pummelled Gaza for a 14th day yesterday, raising the Palestinian death toll to more than 570, as Cairo took centre stage in world efforts to broker a ceasefire.
With air strikes and shelling raining down across the besieged coastal enclave, Israel’s army said seven of its soldiers had been killed, bringing the Israeli toll to 25 troops and two civilians in the bloodiest Gaza conflict since 2009.
With civilians making up the vast majority of Palestinian dead, Washington urged Israel to take “greater steps” to prevent innocent casualties, and UN chief Ban Ki-moon appealed for the violence to “stop now”.
But Hamas has so far rejected truce calls, insisting yesterday on a lifting of Israel’s siege of Gaza and the release of prisoners to cease its rocket fire.
Yesterday’s attacks across Gaza killed at least 55 people including 16 children, bringing the overall death toll since Israel launched its operation on July 8 to 572 Palestinians, officials said.
In the deadliest single Israeli bombardment, an air strike hit a residential tower block in central Gaza City, killing 11 people, including five children.
Seven children were among nine people slain in a strike on a house in the southern city of Rafah, and four children died in a raid on a Gaza City home in which another nine were killed.
It came after Israeli tank shells struck a hospital in Deir al-Balah, killing four people, including doctors, officials said, indicating at least 70 people were wounded.
Israel says its campaign aims to stamp out rocket fire from Gaza, and the ground phase of the operation to destroy tunnels burrowed into Israel by Hamas, the main power in the coastal strip.
But there has been no let-up since the operation began, 84 rockets hitting Israel yesterday, one striking the greater Tel Aviv area, and another 16 shot down, the army said.
UN chief Ban arrived in Cairo for talks on ending the hostilities, followed by US Secretary of State John Kerry, with the two men set to meet to discuss a ceasefire.
In Washington, President Barack Obama repeated that Israel had a right to self-defence, but raised “serious concerns about the rising number of Palestinian civilian deaths and the loss of Israeli lives”.
Since the Israeli operation began on July 8, huge numbers of Gazans have fled their homes, with the UN saying more than 100,000 people have sought shelter in 69 schools run by its Palestinian refugee agency (Unrwa).
“This is a watershed moment for Unrwa, now that the number of people seeking refuge with us is more than double the figure we saw in the 2009 Gaza conflict,” spokesman Chris Gunness said.
Yesterday morning, a UN school on the outskirts of Shejaiya, east of Gaza City, was packed to overflowing with displaced people, many sleeping in the corridors.
Families were sleeping in the gardens of Gaza City’s Shifa hospital in the hope they would be safe from the bombing.
Meanwhile, Israeli forces killed more than 10 Gaza militants who had infiltrated southern Israel, the army said, later announcing it had lost four soldiers in that battle.
The “two terrorist squads” had managed to cross the border through tunnels, it said.
The troops lost in that clash were among seven killed in 24 hours, said the Israeli army, adding 30 soldiers were wounded over the same period.
That brought its toll to 25 soldiers killed since the start of the operation, including 13 on Sunday, the bloodiest single day for the Israeli military since the Lebanon war of 2006.
Late Sunday, Hamas’s armed wing the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades claimed to have captured an Israeli soldier in a report the army said it was checking, but Israel’s UN ambassador said was untrue.
Two Israeli civilians, both hit by rocket fire, have been killed during the 14-day campaign.
Hamas yesterday reiterated its insistence on a lifting of Israel’s blockade of Gaza and the release of prisoners to halt its rocket fire.
“The conditions for a ceasefire are... a full lifting of the blockade and then the release of those recently detained in the West Bank,” its leader in Gaza, Ismail Haniya, said on television.
“We cannot go backwards, to a slow death,” he said, referring to the Israeli blockade in force since 2006.
“The conditions of the Palestinian resistance constitute the minimum required for a truce. The resistance and the sons of our people who have made such sacrifices in this mad war cannot accept anything less.”
Turkey yesterday declared three days of national mourning for the Palestinian victims of Israel’s military operation, denouncing the assault as a “massacre”.
“We condemn Israel’s massacre of the Palestinian people,” Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc told reporters in Ankara in televised comments after a cabinet meeting.
“In a show of solidarity with the Palestinian people, three days of mourning have been declared starting from tomorrow (Tuesday).”
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has sought in the last days to portray himself as the leading global defender of the Palestinian cause, slamming Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip as “genocide”.
“Turkey has maintained a principled stand against Israel’s aggression. It has stood by the righteous, not by the powerful,” said Arinc.
“We are backing the truce talks, but Israel should stop arbitrary practices that can be considered as mass retribution and realise that the national security can only be restored through fair peace.”
Turkey has diplomatic ties with Israel but relations were downgraded in the wake of the deadly 2010 Israeli commando raid on a Turkish activist ship on its way to the Gaza Strip.
Arinc said that before the assault on Gaza started, Turkey and Israel had been close to signing a deal on normalising relations but this idea was off the agenda for now.
“The talks had almost been finalised but then these incidents occurred. It is not possible to sign (a deal) after all that happened,” said Arinc.
“It is not possible for us to sign a compensation deal with the Israeli side in the face of this violence that virtually turned into a genocide,” he added.
