Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Malki on Tuesday said he was optimistic the latest ceasefire in Gaza will hold, even as Palestinians renewed efforts to haul Israelis before the International Criminal Court for war crimes.

A 72-hour truce took hold in the shattered enclave earlier on Tuesday after a Cairo-brokered deal was accepted by both Hamas and Israel, ending 29 days of heavy fighting which has claimed more than 1,800 lives.

Khayri Hasan al-Masri fled his home in Beit Hanun with his wife and three children nearly three weeks ago when Israel announced the launch of its July 17 ground offensive.

They left a tidy white house, with its grassy courtyard, a palm tree and a lemon tree.

Three remaining members of a Palestinian delegation negotiating a longer-term truce in Gaza were on their way to Cairo Tuesday after entering Egypt through the Rafah crossing, state media reported.

Israel and Hamas halted their fighting in Gaza from 0500 GMT Tuesday after a three-day temporary truce brokered by Cairo went into effect. Israel also withdrew its troops from the coastal enclave.

Human Rights Watch on Monday accused Israel of killing civilians as they attempted to flee a stricken neighborhood of Gaza, in what it said would amount to a war crime.

In a report that cited Palestinians who managed to get out of Khuza'a, HRW said the attacks on the town near the southern city of Khan Yunis occurred at the end of July.

One Israeli was killed and five others injured Monday when an excavator rammed into a Jerusalem bus, turning it over before the driver was shot dead by police, officials said. 

The incident took place on the seamline between east and west Jerusalem and came as Israel pressed a major military campaign in Gaza which has killed more than 1,800 Palestinians.

Lying on his bed in a Gaza hospital, three-year-old Yamin now sees the world from behind burns which have disfigured him for life.

The tiny boy is just one of hundreds of burn victims and those wounded by Israeli shell fire overwhelming Gaza's sole working operating theater for plastic surgeons.

A Palestinian delegation including Hamas agreed joint demands Sunday to present to Egyptian mediators in Cairo for a truce with Israel, including an end to the Gaza blockade, officials said.

The delegation, which includes members of President Mahmoud Abbas' Palestinian Authority and Gaza's Hamas rulers, will meet the Egyptian mediators later on Sunday.

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. 

Israeli forces shot dead two Palestinians during separate clashes in the northern and central West Bank on Friday, security and medical sources told Agence France-Presse.

Palestinian security sources said Tamer Smour, 22, was hit by a live bullet in the chest in the city of Tulkarem in the northern West Bank.

The United States placed the blame for Friday's rapid breakdown in the latest Gaza ceasefire squarely at the door of Hamas, accusing the Palestinian militants of launching a "barbaric" attack.

In recent days Washington had begun to express concern about the rising Palestinian civilian death toll in Israel's assault on Gaza, while still strongly backing its right to defend itself.