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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.
Israel hit Gaza with air strikes and Palestinian militants launched rocket barrages at Israel on Saturday, the sixth day of the worst escalation of tensions in years.
Early on Saturday, an air strike hit a three-storey house in Gaza City’s Shati refugee camp, killing eight children and two women from an extended family.
Shortly afterward, Hamas said it fired a salvo of rockets at southern Israel in response to the air strike.
The Israeli military struck a high-rise building in Gaza City where the Associated Press and other media outlets, including Al Jazeera, have their offices. The building was evacuated following an earlier warning.
On Friday, an Israeli barrage killed a family of six in their house and sent thousands fleeing to United Nations-run shelters.

Members of a Palestinian family flee Israeli air strikes on a carriage pulled by a donkey in Beit Lahya in the northern Gaza Strip. Photograph: Mohammed Abed/AFP via Getty


The military said the operation involved 160 warplanes dropping some 80 tonnes of explosives over the course of 40 minutes and succeeded in destroying a vast tunnel network used by Hamas.
Military correspondents in Israeli media said the military believed dozens of militants were killed inside the tunnels.
In Israel, thousands ran for shelter as sirens sounded on Friday night. One rocket, launched from Gaza, struck a residential building in the southern Israeli city of Beersheba, police said. Media said some people were hurt in the town dashing to cover.
Gaza’s infrastructure, already in widespread disrepair because of an Israeli-Egyptian blockade imposed after Hamas seized power in 2007, showed further signs of breakdown.
The United Nations said Gazans are experiencing daily power cuts of eight to 12 hours and at least 230,000 have limited access to tap water.
The impoverished and densely populated territory is home to two million Palestinians, most of them the descendants of refugees from what is now Israel.
Overall, at least 146 people have been killed in Gaza since hostilities erupted on Monday, with 950 others wounded, Palestinian medics said. At least 12 Palestinians were killed overnight in Gaza, including a woman and four of her children who died when their house in a refugee camp was hit.
Israel has reported eight dead, including a soldier on the Gaza border and six civilians, two of them children.
The Hamas and Islamic Jihad militant groups have confirmed 20 deaths in their ranks, but the Israeli military said the real number is far higher.
Conflict
United States diplomat Hady Amr arrived in the region on Friday as part of Washington’s efforts to de-escalate the conflict, and the United Nations Security Council is 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.
Malaysia and Indonesia on Saturday urged the United Nations Security Council to intervene and stop Israel’s strikes on Gaza.
Malaysia has long been a staunch supporter of the Palestinian cause, pushing for a two-state solution based on pre-1967 borders.
The Security Council will publicly discuss the worsening violence on Sunday, diplomats said this week. The 15-member council met privately this week about the worst hostilities in the region in years, but has so far been unable to agree on a public statement, diplomats said.
Ahead of the session on Sunday, the US envoy Hady Amr, deputy assistant secretary for Israel and Palestinian affairs, flew in on Friday. The US embassy in Israel said the aim was “to reinforce the need to work toward a sustainable calm”.
Cairo was pushing for both sides to cease fire from midnight on Friday pending further negotiations, two Egyptian security sources said, with Egypt leaning on Hamas and others, including the US, trying to reach an agreement with Israel.
The foreign ministers of Egypt and Jordan discussed efforts to end the Gaza confrontation and to prevent “provocations” in Jerusalem, Egypt’s foreign ministry said.
“The talks have taken a real and serious path on Friday,” a Palestinian official said. “The mediators from Egypt, Qatar and the United Nations are stepping up their contacts with all sides in a bid to restore calm, but a deal hasn’t yet been reached.”
The United Arab Emirates on Friday called for a ceasefire and negotiations while offering condolences to all victims of the fighting, citing the promise of September accords that made the UAE and Bahrain the first Arab states in a quarter century to establish formal ties with Israel.
Hamas, the Islamist group that rules Gaza, launched the rocket attacks on Monday, in retaliation for Israeli police clashes with Palestinians near al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam’s third holiest site, in East Jerusalem.
The Israeli military said more than 2,000 rockets had been fired from Gaza into Israel since the start of the conflict, around half of them intercepted by missile defence systems and 350 fell into the Gaza Strip.
Civil unrest between Jews and Arabs in Israel dealt a strong blow to efforts by prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s opponents to unseat the Israeli leader after a series of inconclusive elections, giving rise to expectations Israelis will go to the polls for an unprecedented fifth time in just more than two years. – Reuters/ AP