Four Palestinian children were killed and one was critically wounded on a Gaza beach on Wednesday (July 16) by a shell fired by an Israeli naval gunboat, a Palestinian health official said.
Asked about the incident, an Israeli military spokesman in Tel Aviv said he was checking the report.
Gaza medical officials said at least 209 Palestinians, including at least 150 civilians, among them 31 children, have been killed in the fighting between Gaza's Hamas and Israel.
In contrast only one Israeli was killed while delivering food to the Israeli army in bordering areas. Israel's Iron Dome anti-missile system intercepted 20 of the Hamas projectiles, including two over the Tel Aviv area, and the rest caused no damage or casualties.
Hamas and Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the attack against Israel's commercial capital, which has been targeted frequently since the war began, as well as for the rocket that killed the Israeli man along the border.
This comes as Hamas has officially told Egypt that it rejects an Egyptian-proposed Gaza ceasefire, a spokesman for the Islamist group said on Wednesday.
"The outcome of discussions within the internal institutions of the movement was to reject the proposal and therefore, Hamas informed Egypt last night it apologizes for not accepting it," spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said.
Israel has resumed its air strikes in the Gaza Strip earlier on Wednesday a day after holding its fire in deference to an Egyptian-proposed cease-fire deal that failed to get Hamas militants to halt rocket attacks.
Attacks in the Gaza Strip killed at least seven Palestinians in the early hours of Wednesday, Gaza health officials said, and destroyed the house of Mahmoud Zahar - who is believed to be in hiding elsewhere - in the first apparent targeting of a top Hamas political leader.
The week-old conflict seemed to be at a turning point on Tuesday, with Hamas defying Arab and Western calls to cease fire and Israel threatening to step up an offensive that could include an invasion of the densely populated enclave.
The Israeli military said on Wednesday it had sent out warning messages to residents in the northern Gaza Strip to evacuate their homes by 0800 (0500 GMT) ahead of renewed attacks. A military source was also quoted by AFP as saying that 100,000 Gazans were asked to leave their homes east of the coastal enclave.
Palestinian officials said residents in two Gaza City neighborhoods had received the warnings but Gaza Interior Ministry told people not to heed the Israeli messages and dismissed them as psychological warfare.
Gaza militants kept up rocket salvoes into Israel, firing more than 150 rockets at Israel since Tuesday, when the truce was to begin.
Under the blueprint announced by Egypt - Gaza's neighbor and whose military-backed government has been at odds with Islamist Hamas - a mutual "de-escalation" was to have begun at 9 a.m. (0600 GMT), with hostilities ceasing within 12 hours.
The surge in hostilities over the past week was prompted by the murder last month of three Jewish seminary students in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and the revenge killing on July 2 of a Palestinian youth in Jerusalem. Israel said on Monday
three Jews in police custody had confessed to killing the Palestinian.
Positions:
US Secretary of State John Kerry from Vienna voiced his country's endless support for Israel: "I cannot condemn strongly enough the actions of Hamas in so brazenly firing rockets, in multiple numbers, in the face of a goodwill effort (to secure) a cease-fire."
For his part, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose security cabinet voted 6-2 earlier on Tuesday to accept the truce, had cautioned that Israel would respond strongly if rockets kept flying.
He expected the "full support from the responsible members of the international community" for any intensification of Israeli attacks in response to Hamas spurning a truce, reports said.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who reached an agreement with Hamas in April that led to the formation of a unity government last month, called for acceptance of the ceasefire proposal, the official Palestinian news agency WAFA said.
Abbas was expected to arrive in Cairo on Wednesday for talks with President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the Palestinian leader's spokesman said. The Arab League, at a meeting on Monday, also welcomed the cease-fire plan.
Under the proposal announced by Egypt's Foreign Ministry, high-level delegations from Israel and the Palestinian factions would hold separate talks in Cairo within 48 hours to consolidate the ceasefire with "confidence-building measures".
Hamas leaders have said any deal must include an end to Israel's blockade of Gaza and a recommitment to a truce reached in an eight-day war there in 2012.
Hamas also wants Egypt to ease curbs at its Rafah crossing with Gaza, imposed after the military ousted President Mohamed Mursi, an Islamist, a year ago.
The Egyptian proposal made no mention of Rafah or when restrictions might be eased.
Hamas has faced a cash crisis and Gaza's economic hardship has deepened as a result of Egypt's destruction of cross-border smuggling tunnels. Egyptian authorities also accuse Hamas of assisting anti-government Islamist militants in Egypt's Sinai peninsula, an accusation that the Palestinian group denies.
Hamas has said it also wants the release of hundreds of its activists arrested in the West Bank while Israel searched for the three missing teenagers.
The proposed truce also made no mention of the detainees.
REUTERS
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