GAZA CITY: Twelve Palestinians, including a toddler, were killed on Wednesday as Israel pounded Gaza with air strikes and spearheaded a fresh incursion, one day after president Mahmud Abbas demanded a ceasefire.
Nearly 130 Palestinians have now been killed in Israel's offensive in Gaza, increasingly sidelined as the world focuses on a deadlier conflict in Lebanon but waged in order to recover a captured soldier and stop rocket attacks.
As world diplomats opened a conference in Rome seeking to halt the bloodshed between Israel and the Shiite militant group Hezbollah, 12 Palestinians were killed in multiple Israeli attacks in eastern Gaza City, medics said.
At least six of the dead were named militants, including four from the armed wing of the governing Hamas movement, one of the three hardline groups to claim responsibility for the June 25 raid in which Corporal Gilad Shalit was seized.
Medics said most of the bodies brought into hospital after the attacks were ripped to pieces, as paramedics rushed at least 45 wounded people, including two journalists working for Palestine TV, to treatment.
An Israeli military spokesman said the air force had carried out more than a dozen air strikes targeting armed gunmen east of Gaza City as troops mounted a fresh incursion in the outer fringes of the largest Palestinian city.
Gunfire erupted on the ground as Israel stepped up its nearly five-week offensive after a relative lull that has nonetheless put soldiers back in impoverished Gaza less than 10 months after they ended a 38-year presence.
Security sources reported heavy exchanges of fire as Israeli troops thrust about two kilometres (just over a mile) from the border with Israel.
Apart from six named militants, a three-year-old girl, a male resident and a 17-year-old boy were among the dead, medics said.
With Israel ignoring repeated international calls for restraint, a military spokesman said at least 15 air strikes had all targeted a "armed gunmen" and insisted "we only identified armed gunmen" after the attacks.
Aircraft also struck a Gaza City building used by a controversial paramilitary force set up by the Hamas-led government, and a house in the Gaza-Egypt border town of Rafah, which had already been hit on Tuesday.
