Gaza families flee as Israel continues bombardment

In a separate air strike, a government building housing information technology was also damaged. No injuries were reported in both strikes.

The Israeli offensive against Gaza’s ruling Hamas entered its seventh day on Monday and shows no signs of slowing, despite international calls for a cease-fire. There have been more than 940 such launches by Gaza’s dominant Hamas and other factions in the past week, Israel says.

‘Ceasefire’

It has not suffered fatalities, due in part to the success of its Iron Dome rocket interceptors, but the salvoes have disrupted life in major cities, paralysed vulnerable southern towns and triggered Israeli mobilisation of troops for a possible Gaza invasion if the air campaign failed to curb Hamas.

Benjamin Netanyahu began this crazy war and he must end his war first. Hamas leader Izzat Al-Reshiq

US Secretary of State John Kerry, whose bid to broker a wider peace deal collapsed in April when Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu called off negotiations with western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas over his power-share with Islamist Hamas, offered on Sunday to help secure a Gaza truce.

The call was echoed by France and by Germany, which will send its foreign minister to the region on Monday. But with the United States and European Union, like Israel, shunning Hamas as a terrorist group, Middle Eastern intermediaries were mooted.

A US official said that Mr Kerry, in a phone conversation with Mr Netanyahu, “described his engagement with leaders in the region to help to stop the rocket fire so calm can be restored and civilian casualties prevented, and underscored the United States’ readiness to facilitate a cessation of hostilities, including a return to the November 2012 ceasefire agreement”.

Egyptian-mediated

That referred to an Egyptian-mediated accord that doused the last big Gaza flare-up. Cairo is now again seeking calm. Hamas, said it also received US overtures through Abbas and Qatar. Turkey has sought to intercede as well, Israeli media said.

Mr Netanyahu’s spokesman declined to discuss the conversation with Mr Kerry. Another Israeli official played down the truce talk. “We are not considering this-or-that proposal,” the official, who declined to be named, said late on Sunday.

While allowing that a diplomatic solution could eventually be found, the official said Israel would, for now, pursue its military offensive “to restore quiet over a protracted period by inflicting significant damage to Hamas and the other terrorist groups in the Gaza Strip”.

Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the second-most potent Gaza faction, made clear they would not accept a mere “calm for calm” where both Palestinian fighters and Israeli forces stand down.

“Netanyahu began this crazy war and he must end his war first,” Hamas leader Izzat Al-Reshiq told Al-Arabiya television.

Rocket fire from Gaza had increased during the West Bank dragnet. Tensions were further inflamed when the three teens’ bodies were discovered, after which suspected Israeli avengers abducted and killed a Palestinian youth from East Jerusalem.

Hamas neither confirmed nor denied responsibility for the West Bank kidnappings, which came as it struggled to parlay the unity deal with Abbas into economic relief for Gaza, whose other border with Egypt has been sealed off by a Cairo government that considers the Palestinian Islamists a security threat.