Benjamin Netanyahu, initially accused by Israel's most ardent hawks of dithering over Hamas rocket fire, appears to have found at least a temporary political balance with his punishing air campaign against Gaza.

But rivals on the far-right are still snapping at him, some demanding that he strangle the densely populated and impoverished Palestinian enclave by cutting off electricity, fuel and food, and others insisting he send in troops and reoccupy it.

The world's largest Muslim bloc Thursday urged the UN Security Council to force a halt to Israel's air war on Gaza that has killed more than 80 Palestinians in three days.

The Organization of Islamic Cooperation, after a meeting of its executive committee in the Saudi city of Jeddah, said it was forming a ministerial team to lobby the Security Council and international community "to halt the Israeli aggression".

Israeli strikes on Gaza killed at least 32 people Thursday as an air war entered its third day, with most of the bloodshed in the southern city of Khan Yunis, medics said.

The latest bloodshed raised to 83 the overall number of Gazans killed since Israel launched Operation Protective Edge early on Tuesday to halt cross-border rocket fire by militant groups.

Three of the six Israelis held over the abduction and killing of a Palestinian teenager last week are to be released, Israeli media said on Wednesday.

"Three of six suspects in murder of Palestinian teen Mohammed Abu Khder to be freed Thursday," the Haaretz daily said.

Nobel peace laureate Desmond Tutu has lashed out at Israeli and Palestinian leaders for behaving "like children," seeking to blame each other for the latest bloody conflagration in the long-running conflict.

"Once again, the people of Israel and Palestine are embroiled in a deadly contest of tit-for-tat violence in which there can never be victors, only losers," the South African cleric said in a statement.

France strongly condemns “aggression” against Israel and stands with it in the face of rocket attacks from Gaza, the French president told the Israeli prime minister on Wednesday in a phone call.

Francois Hollande "expressed France's solidarity (with Israel) in the face of rocket fire from Gaza" and told Benjamin Netanyahu "that France strongly condemns these aggressions," said a statement from the French presidency.

In Gaza's stifling midday heat, grieving relatives of a family killed in an Israeli air strike sit outside a mosque, weary from their Ramadan fast and nervously anticipating the next deadly blast.

The mourners, most of them men, have come to bury six members of the Hammad family, including a teenager and two women, killed when a missile slammed into their home in the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanun.

The Arab League called Tuesday for the U.N. Security Council to hold an urgent meeting to discuss the deadly Israeli air campaign against Gaza, Secretary General Nabil al-Arabi said.

Fourteen people were killed Tuesday and dozens wounded in a number of attacks in the most serious flare-up in and around the Palestinian territory since November 2012.

The involvement of Jewish extremists in the brutal murder of a Palestinian teenager has forced Israel to confront the growing danger of violently anti-Arab narrative peddled by the far-right fringe. 

"The diabolical murder of 16-year-old Palestinian Mohammed Abu Khder is the Shin Bet's nightmare scenario," wrote Yossi Melman in Maariv newspaper, referring to Israel's internal security agency.

A Jerusalem court ordered Sunday that a Palestinian American teenager, who was allegedly beaten in police custody, be released to house arrest for nine days pending an investigation into stone-throwing allegations.

Tariq Abu Khder, 15, who holds U.S. citizenship and lives in Florida, is a cousin of Mohammed Abu Khder, a 16-year-old Palestinian whose kidnap and murder by suspected Jewish extremists on Wednesday sparked four straight days of riots.