220 Dead, 1550 Hurt in Ongoing Israeli Assault on Gaza as Hamas Announces Rejecting Egypt Truce Deal
More than 200 people have been killed and 1550 others wounded in the ongoing Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip, as Hamas officials communicated to Egyptian authorities on Wednesday their rejection of the proposed truce deal.
Hamas rejected the ceasefire proposal which Egypt put forward this week, complaining it had not been a party to the discussions.
In the latest Israeli attack, seven people were killed in three strikes in Gaza on Wednesday evening, emergency services said.
Emergency services spokesman Ashraf al-Qudra said the Palestinians killed included four members of a family in Khan Yunis, among them two children, aged six and four.
Hours before, four children were killed in Gaza City, medics said, in Israeli shelling witnessed by AFP journalists.
All four were on the beach when the attack took place, al-Qudra said, with several injured children taking refuge at a nearby hotel where journalists were staying.
The first strike hit at around 1300 GMT, prompting children and adults on the beach to scatter, as others rushed out to see what had happened.
A second and third struck as they ran, setting fire to huts on the beach as terrified children shouted that there were dead and injured.
The strikes appeared to be the result of shelling by the Israeli navy against an area with small shacks used by fishermen.
Several children ran inside the hotel where AFP journalists saw at least three with shrapnel injuries.
They were evacuated by ambulances, which also picked up more injured people from the beach, including one man who was missing part of his leg.
But later on Wednesday evening, the Israeli army said the killing of the four Palestinian children appeared to be the "tragic outcome" of a strike targeting Hamas militants.
"Based on preliminary results the target of this strike was Hamas terrorist operatives," the military said in a statement. "The reported civilian casualties from this strike are a tragic outcome."
The strike raised Wednesday's death toll to 22.
Earlier, a woman and a child were among three people killed in an Israeli strike on southern Gaza.
The raid took place in the southern city of Khan Yunis, killing three people from the Abu Daqqa family and wounding another five people, Ashraf al-Qudra said.
Among the dead was a 10-year-old boy and a 65-year-old woman, with witnesses saying the missile struck a car in Bani Suheila in the eastern part of the city.
Also on Wednesday, a strike on a house in Rafah, which straddles Gaza's southern border with Egypt, killed two men, and shortly afterwards, another young man was killed in a second strike, with witnesses identifying him as an Islamic Jihad militant.
A third strike on the city killed another man, Qudra said.
Meanwhile in Khan Yunis, a missile struck the house of Mohammed al-Arjani, killing his 19-year-old son Abdullah.
About an hour later, tank fire from inside Israel hit the eastern part of Khan Yunis, killing one person, Qudra said.
Shortly afterwards, another member of the Abu Daqqa family was also killed in the same area, he said, identifying him as Mahmud Abu Daqqa, 33.
Wednesday's air strikes raised the overall toll from Israel's nine-day operation to 220 Palestinians, with more than 1,550 injured.
According to figures provided by the Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), more than 80 percent of the victims were civilians.
So far, one person has been killed in Israel -- a civilian who died on Tuesday evening in a rocket strike near the northern Erez crossing, medics said. Four Israelis have been seriously wounded.
Since the latest violence began before dawn on July 8, 990 rockets fired from Gaza have struck Israel, and another 244 have been shot down by the Iron Dome anti-missile system, army figures show.
Twenty-four more have struck Israel since midnight (2100 GMT), and another 10 have been intercepted.
In the same period, Israel had struck more than 1,750 "terror targets" across the coastal enclave, the army said.
Israel on Wednesday told 100,000 Gazans to flee their homes but the warning was largely ignored, as regional leaders made fresh attempts to end the bloody nine-day confrontation.
Israel resumed its punishing air campaign after Egyptian-brokered truce efforts collapsed, while Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas was due both in Cairo and later Ankara in search of regional support for an immediate end to the fighting.
Warplanes during the night struck about 40 sites across Gaza, among them political targets, as militants also kept up their fire on Israel's coastal plain, with four rockets shot down over metropolitan Tel Aviv.
The Israeli military also dropped flyers and sent text messages warning 100,000 people in northeastern Gaza to evacuate their homes ahead of an air campaign targeting "terror sites and operatives" in Zeitun and Shejaiya, two flashpoint districts east of Gaza City.
An identical message was sent to Beit Lahiya in the north, echoing a similar army warning on Sunday, when more than 17,000 residents of the north fled for their lives, most seeking refuge in U.N.-run schools.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday vowed to step up the military campaign after Hamas dismissed an Egyptian ceasefire proposal, firing scores of rockets over the border despite the army holding its fire for six hours.
"This would have been better resolved diplomatically... but Hamas leaves us no choice but to expand and intensify the campaign against it," he said.
Meanwhile, Haaretz newspaper said the stillborn Egyptian truce had been pieced together after a phone call between Netanyahu and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi on Saturday, which took place following mediation efforts by Mideast Quartet envoy Tony Blair.
Quoting senior Israeli officials and Western diplomats, the paper said the reason the Egyptian initiative failed was because it was "prepared hastily" and was not coordinated with Hamas.
Hamas on Tuesday said it had rejected the Cairo truce efforts because it had not been included in the discussions.
However, Mussa Abu Marzuq, a senior figure within Hamas's exiled political leadership who is based in Cairo, said the Islamist movement was still in discussions about a possible ceasefire.
Speaking to reporters in Cairo, Azzam al-Ahmed, a leading figure in Abbas's Fatah movement, confirmed talks about a truce were ongoing, and said a senior Hamas official would meet to discuss the matter during the day with an Egyptian mediator.
Abbas himself was to arrive in Egyptian capital later on Wednesday for top-level truce talks, and was scheduled to travel to Turkey on a similar mission on Thursday, officials said.
Meanwhile, in an overnight meeting, Israel's security cabinet approved plans to destroy Hamas's network of tunnels that riddles Gaza, army radio said.
They also discussed the possibility of a limited ground incursion which would not initially involve entering towns of villages, it said.
"Israel has no option but to continue the operation and intensify it," former national security adviser Giora Eiland told army radio.
"The main dilemma is over a ground operation," he said, explaining that only a ground operation could inflict "real destruction" on Hamas's network of underground tunnels.
"It looks like we’re rolling in that direction, since air strikes have their limitations."
Source: Naharnet, Agence France Presse
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