REPORT: Gaza war takes on deadly routine despite calls for truce

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Hamas' military wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigade, said on Monday that has carried out a drone surveillance mission over the Israeli Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv.

"Today we reveal for the first time that our drones carried out specific missions during one of their sorties over the Zionist War Ministry in Tel Aviv, in which the aggression on Gaza is led," the group said in a statement.

The Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigade added in its statement that it had manufactured three models of unmanned drones, calling them “Ababil 1,” and that the drones have been flown before into Israel’s interior without being detected.

Earlier, Israel said it shot down a drone from Gaza a week into its offensive on Monday, the first reported deployment of an unmanned aircraft by Palestinian militants whose rocket attacks have been regularly intercepted.

Hamas said its armed wing had sent several drones to carry out "special missions" deep inside Israel - a development which, if confirmed, would mark a step up in the sophistication of its arsenal.

At least 174 Palestinians, most of them civilians, have been killed, Gaza health officials said, in seven days of fighting that has shown no sign of ending.

Israeli aircraft and naval gunboats attacked 204 targets in the Gaza Strip overnight, said the army, in the worst flare-up in Israeli-Palestinian violence in almost two years.

Health officials said at least 20 people were wounded. Palestinian militants fired more than 20 rockets into Israel, causing no casualties, the military added.

The Israeli military said the drone was intercepted near the port of Ashdod by a US-built Patriot missile, used largely ineffectively by Israel against Iraqi Scud missiles in the 1991 Gulf War.

The force was trying to locate debris in the area about 25 km (15 miles) north of Gaza, and determine whether it had carried explosives.

There was no sign of any sharp escalation of Israeli attacks in the northern Gaza Strip, where Israel threatened on Sunday to step up strikes against rocket-launching sites in parts of the town Beit Lahiya and urged thousands of its residents to leave.

A UN aid agency said around a quarter of Beit Lahiya's 70,000 residents have fled deeper into the Gaza Strip. Al-Mezan, a Gaza-based Palestinian human rights group, said 869 Palestinian homes have been destroyed or damaged in Israeli attacks over the past week.

Elsewhere, hundreds of Palestinians took part in the funeral processions of a Palestinian man who was shot dead by Israeli troops on Monday (July 14) during clashes in the occupied West Bank.

Israel also detained dozens of Palestinians overnight in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, said activists, part of a crackdown on suspected militants stepped up last month after the abduction and killing of three Jewish seminary students.

A Palestinian witness said Munir Al-Badarin, 21, and other young men were throwing rocks at soldiers outside the West Bank village of Samoa when they were fired on by another army unit.

Ambulance driver Abdel-Mua'ez Al-Jarsawi told Reuters he was summoned to Samoa, where soldiers initially held him back as they tried to resuscitate Badarin, who was shot twice in the lower back.

Jarsawi said he took Badarin to a nearby Palestinian hospital where the young man died. An Israeli military source said Badarin was among three masked men spotted throwing rocks and bottles of paint at Israeli cars passing Samoa.

Tensions mounted further after a Palestinian youth was abducted in Jerusalem and burned alive in what Israeli police believe was a revenge attack by far-right Jews.

DIPLOMATIC EFFORTS

Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad al-Maliki met Arab League Secretary General Nabil al-Arabi on Monday (July 14) in Cairo before a scheduled urgent meeting set to take place at the Arab League later.

The meeting is set to discuss the Palestinian-Israeli hostilities that Gaza health officials say have killed at least 174 Palestinians over the last week.

Maliki called on the UN to stop the Israeli hostilities against the Palestinian people.

“We hope that the United Nations will move towards discussing the Palestinian demand to hasten the response and provide safety and protection to the defenseless Palestinian peoples that are being subjected to a genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity that are committed not only by the Israeli soldiers but by those who give them orders; whether politicians, security officials, parliamentary and others,” he said.

In turn, US Secretary of State John Kerry, whose bid to broker a wider Israeli-Palestinian peace deal collapsed in April, 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.

Qatar and Turkey have also been suggested as possible truce brokers.

There have been no fatalities in Israel since border hostilities intensified last Tuesday. Israel's Iron Dome anti-missile system has intercepted many of the rocket salvoes.

But the persistent rocket fire has disrupted life in major cities, paralyzed vulnerable southern towns and triggered Israeli mobilization of troops for a possible Gaza invasion if the Palestinian rockets persisted.

REUTERS

To watch Maytham Kassir's report, please click on the VIDEO above