GAZA -- The civilian death toll climbed in Israel's air offensive against the Gaza Strip yesterday and Palestinian Islamists vowed revenge for the Thursday killing of senior Hamas leader Nizar Rayyan and his family.
There was no sign of a ceasefire on the seventh day of the conflict, in which at least 425 Palestinians have been killed and 2,000 wounded, but a Palestinian official said that Egypt had begun exploratory talks with Hamas to halt the bloodshed.
The senior Palestinian official, who declined to be identified and who has been close to previous talks between Egypt and Hamas, said the aim of the talks included promoting ideas that would lead to a new truce.
Early this morning, Hamas said that a senior commander of its military wing, Abu Zakaria al-Jamal, had died from wounds sustained in an Israeli air strike last night.
Four Israeli civilians have been killed by Palestinian rockets fired from Gaza, which strike southern cities and towns at random and cause property damage and panic among the local population.
A United Nations agency said the civilian death toll in Gaza was more than 25 per cent of the total killed in the violence. A leading Palestinian human-rights group put it at 40 per cent.
Of six Palestinians reported killed yesterday in more than 30 Israeli air strikes, five were civilians, local medics said.
Before the air strikes, Israel's military called some of the houses to warn of an impending attack. In some cases, it also fired a sound bomb to warn civilians before flattening the homes with missiles, Palestinians and Israeli officials said.
Islamist fighters earlier fired rockets at Israel's ancient port of Ashkelon, one of which blew out windows in an apartment building. Another house took a direct hit from a long-range missile later in the day, and cars were set ablaze.
Gaza militants, mourning a hard-line Hamas leader killed by an air strike on Thursday along with a number of family members, said all options - including suicide bombings - are now open to "strike at Zionist interests everywhere."
Israel's armoured forces remained massed on the Gaza frontier in preparation for a possible ground invasion, despite international calls for a halt to the conflict. Israeli leaders were in conference yesterday evening and media reports said they were discussing an "imminent" incursion.
The White House said yesterday that Israel must decide for itself whether to go into the Gaza Strip with ground forces, but it cautioned that any actions should avoid civilian casualties.
In Gaza City, a few hundred foreign passport holders boarded buses in the pre-dawn murk to leave the Strip, with the help of the International Committee of the Red Cross, their governments and Israeli compliance.
They left behind 1.5 million Palestinians unable to escape the conflict, a city facing another day of bombs, missiles, flickering electricity, queues for bread, taped-up windows and streets littered with broken glass and debris.
There were protests by Palestinians in West Bank cities. In Ramallah, Hamas supporters scuffled with the Fatah faction of Western-backed Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, taunting them as collaborators. Elsewhere, protesters stoned soldiers at checkpoints. Some were wounded by rubber bullets.
In the Jordanian capital, Amman, riot police fired tear gas to disperse hundreds of protesters marching on the Israeli embassy, chanting: "No Jewish embassy on Arab land."
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