Israel pummelled the Gaza Strip with air strikes on Saturday, killing 10 members of an extended family and demolishing a building housing international media outlets, as Palestinian militants fired back barrages of rockets.
The sharp uptick in violence, now in its sixth day, claimed more lives as clashes also swept the occupied West Bank.
As a US envoy was preparing to meet both sides to push for a truce, Israeli fighter jets struck several sites in the densely populated Gaza Strip, which it has blockaded for more than a decade.
Palestinian militants responded with volleys of rockets into Israel, killing a man near Tel Aviv.
Balls of flame thrust into the sky on Saturday afternoon as Israel’s air force flattened a 13-floor Gaza building housing Qatar-based Al Jazeera and the Associated Press news agency, after giving a warning to evacuate.
“It is clear that those who are waging this war do not only want to spread destruction and death in Gaza, but also to silence media that are witnessing, documenting and reporting the truth,” Al Jazeera’s Jerusalem bureau chief, Walid al-Omari, told AFP.
AP President and CEO Gary Pruitt said he was “shocked and horrified” by the attack.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told US President Joe Biden that Israel did its utmost to safeguard civilians in its Gaza bombing campaign.
“The proof is that towers containing terror sites are cleared of uninvolved people prior to being attacked,” he said.
Jawad Mehdi, the owner of the Jala Tower, said an Israeli intelligence officer had told him he had just an hour to evacuate the building.
Israel claimed that “military intelligence” agents of Hamas, the Gaza Strip’s Islamist rulers, were also in the building.
Biden also for the first time since he took office spoke to Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, the Ramallah presidency said.
The White House earlier said it had told the Israelis that “the safety and security of journalists and independent media is a paramount responsibility”.
AFP’s Global News Director Phil Chetwynd said: “We are profoundly shocked the offices of media organisations would be targeted in this way and we stand in solidarity with our colleagues from the Associated Press and Al Jazeera at this difficult time.”
In 2012, the building housing AFP’s Gaza offices was among those targeted by Israeli strikes. No AFP staff were harmed.
– ‘Striking our children’ –
Earlier, an Israeli strike on a three-storey building in the Shati refugee camp killed 10 members of an extended family — two mothers and their four children each. Israel’s army claimed the building was used by senior Hamas officials.
Mohammed al-Hadidi said he had lost most of his family the strike.
“What did they do to deserve this? We’re civilians,” said the devastated father, whose five-month-old baby was also wounded in the explosion.
“They are striking our children — children — without prior warning.”
Tor Wennesland, the UN Middle East envoy, said he was “appalled” and that 40 Gazan and two Israeli children had been killed in recent days.
Israeli air and artillery strikes on Gaza since Monday have killed 145 people including 41 children, and wounded another 1,100, health officials say.
Palestinian armed groups have fired at least 2,300 rockets at Israel, killing 10 people, including a child and a soldier, and wounding over 560 Israelis. Israeli air defences have intercepted many rockets.
On Saturday afternoon, a rocket fired from Gaza killed an Israeli man on the outskirts of commercial capital Tel Aviv, police and medics said.
Palestinians on Saturday marked the Nakba, the “catastrophe” that saw hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced during Israel’s creation in 1947-1948.
Eleven Palestinians were killed Friday in clashes in the West Bank.
A Palestinian security source said the fighting was the “most intense” since the second intifada, or uprising, that began in 2000.
– ‘Sustainable calm’ –
US Secretary for Israel-Palestinian Affairs Hady Amr was to hold talks Sunday with Israeli leaders before meeting Palestinian officials to seek a “sustainable calm”, the State Department said.
The UN Security Council was to meet Sunday to discuss the violence.
Washington, which blocked a UN Security Council meeting scheduled for Friday, has been criticised for not doing enough to calm the violence.
Pro-Palestinian demonstrators staged protests across the world, including in Paris where police used water cannon against them.
Israel, which is also trying to contain Jewish-Arab violence within its borders, is facing its bloodiest conflict with Gaza militants since 2014.
It launched strikes Monday after Hamas fired rockets towards Jerusalem following bloody Israeli police action at the flashpoint Al-Aqsa mosque compound.
That followed a crackdown against protests over planned Israeli expulsions of Palestinians in an Israeli-occupied east Jerusalem neighbourhood.
– 10,000 Palestinians displaced –
Some 10,000 Gazans have fled homes near the Israeli border for fear of a ground offensive, the UN said.
“They are sheltering in schools, mosques and other places during a global Covid-19 pandemic with limited access to water, food, hygiene and health services, UN humanitarian official Lynn Hastings said.
Mixed Jewish-Arab towns within Israel have also seen mob violence, with more than 750 people arrested this week, police said. Dozens of Arab-Israelis were detained overnight.
Israel’s northern borders with Lebanon and Syria, with which it remains technically at war, were also tense.
Three rockets were launched from Syria Friday, while Israel’s army said it fired “warning shots” towards potential infiltrators from Lebanon.
Hundreds of people brandishing Palestinian flags and the yellow colours of Hezbollah gathered in southern Lebanon Saturday for the funeral of a Lebanese protester killed by the Israeli fire.
