Israel has pummelled Gaza with air strikes and Palestinian militants launched rocket barrages at Tel Aviv and other cities on Saturday, with no sign yet of an end to the worst escalation in years in the region, almost a week into the conflict.
US and Arab diplomats are seeking to calm the situation. Violence overnight saw militants fire about 200 rockets at cities in Israel, whose planes struck what it said were targets used by Hamas, the Islamist group that runs Gaza.
At least 139 people, including 39 children, have been killed in Gaza since hostilities erupted on Monday, Palestinian medics said.
Israel has reported nine dead, including children.
The Israeli bombardment overnight killed more than 15 Palestinians in Gaza, medics said, including a woman and four of her children who died when their house in a refugee camp was hit. Five others died, with others wounded, the medics said.
Israel’s military said of the incident that it had hit an apartment in the Beach refugee camp used by Hamas. It said details of the case were under review.
In Israel, thousands of Israelis ran for shelter. Sirens wailed repeatedly across Tel Aviv on Saturday. One rocket struck a residential building in the commercial hub’s suburb of Ramat Gan, killing one person there, medics said.
Read the article by Nidal al-Mughrabi and Rami Ayyub in The Canberra Times.