Seven people, including a teenager and five gunmen, were killed in the Gaza Strip Saturday as Israel pressed an offensive on militants that has left 42 Palestinians and one soldier dead in four days.
The bloodshed followed one of Gaza's deadliest days in months, when 19 people were killed as Israel continued with an operation launched early Wednesday aimed at stopping rocket fire into Israeli territory.
Two brothers, aged 25 and 26, as well as a 16-year-old boy were killed in an afternoon helicopter raid in Jabaliya. The armed wing of the ruling Islamist Hamas movement said the brothers belonged to the faction. Earlier a local Hamas militant commander was killed in an air raid in Gaza City that wounded four other militants, medics said.
A Hamas militant and a 46-year-old man were killed in Beit Hanun, and another Hamas militant died of wounds sustained in an artillery strike on nearby Jabaliya, which wounded four other gunmen. One Israeli soldier was also seriously wounded in overnight clashes, the army said.
Faced with the mounting death toll, Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, who has slammed the operation as a "massacre," called on the United Nations Security Council to convene to discuss the issue, his spokesman told AFP.
The president "has sent a message to the head of the Security Council asking him to convene immediately to discuss the tragic situation in Gaza because of Israeli aggression, which has killed 42 Palestinians so far," Nabil Abu Rudeina said.
Abbas also called the Arab League chief Amr Mussa to "initiate an Arab League meeting to discuss the Israeli aggression against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip." In Beit Hanun, which has been reoccupied by Israeli forces since the start of the operation, residents who have been cooped up inside their homes since Wednesday got a brief respite after the army suspended patrols for three hours to give them a chance to step outside.
Israel says the town, which has borne the brunt of "Operation Autumn Clouds", has become a launchpad for the rocket fire. "Most of the time, because of the combat, we're calling on people that it's best to stay at home," an army spokesman said.
"Today between 8 am and 11 am (0600 and 0900 GMT) humanitarian organisations were allowed into Beit Hanun and we stopped many of our patrols in order for people to leave their homes, open their stores."
The UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, delivered water, food and other basic assistance into the town, with its Gaza director John Ging saying that the situation inside the town was "desperate". "Death, destruction and despair are the terms to describe the situation," Ging told reporters afterward.
"The situation is very grim. The civilian population is living in a very difficult situation. There is shortage of food, of water, there is destruction and devastation everywhere... The entire population is now living in fear, it's extremely dangerous."
"We have to make an appeal to end the violence because the cycle of violence results in innocent civilians paying the price, often with their lives," he said. In all, 42 Palestinians, including at least 21 militants, and one Israeli soldier have died and more than 90 Palestinians have been wounded in the operation, which has also seen around 100 people detained.
Israel says it launched the operation to stop militants from firing rockets, an almost constant curse in communities bordering the Gaza Strip since Israel left the territory last year and closed the curtain on a 38-year occupation.
But the latest military blitz has failed to stop the fire, with one rocket falling in Israel on Saturday and 17 in all since the start of the operation on Wednesday, lightly wounding at least three people.
To protest the operation, businesses in the West Bank went on strike Saturday, with shopfronts in Ramallah remaining shuttered after a call to do so by the Al-Aqsa Brigades, a militant group loosely linked with president Mahmud Abbas's Fatah party.
On the international front, Britain, France and the United Nations called for restraint and avoiding further civilian casualties, but Israel's most powerful ally the United States put the blame for the violence on Palestinian militants and said the Jewish state was defending itself.
Egypt, one of two Arab countries to have signed a peace treaty with Israel, Saturday condemned the operation's "excessive use of force and lack of regard for civilians."
Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit also called on all Palestinian factions "to stop launching rockets in order not to provoke a reaction by the Israeli forces, and not to give them a pretext to carry out other intensive military offensives which do not spare civilians."
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