GAZA: Israel kept up its air and naval bombardments of the Gaza Strip despite growing international pressure on Tel Aviv for a ceasefire, and Palestinian militants resumed rocket attacks on the Israeli capital after a 24-hour lull.

The military said it had shot down a drone from Gaza, the first reported deployment of an unmanned aircraft by Palestinian militants whose rocket attacks have been regularly intercepted.

The use of a drone would mark a step up in the sophistication of the Palestinian arsenal, although it was not immediately clear whether it was armed.

Around half a dozen Israelis have been wounded since the start of the week-old offensive, which Gaza health officials say has killed 169 Palestinians, most of them civilians.

With international calls mounting for a ceasefire, Egyptian media said US Secretary of State John Kerry was due in Cairo on Tuesday for talks on the Gaza situation. There was no immediate US confirmation of the report.

UN asked to revoke Israel’s membership

The worst flare-up of Israeli-Palestinian violence for almost two years was sparked by the murder of three Israeli teenagers and revenge killing of a Palestinian youth.

Israel has arrested three people, two of them minors, over the Palestinian’s murder and officials said on Monday they had confessed to burning him alive.

The European Union said it was in touch with “all parties in the region” to press for an immediate halt to the hostilities, a day after Mr Kerry offered to help secure a Gaza truce.

Egypt and Qatar are seen as potential mediators but peace efforts were complicated by Hamas’s rejection of a mere “calm for calm” in which both sides hold their fire in favour of wider conditions, including prisoner release and an end to Israel’s Gaza blockade.

The Israeli army said its aircraft and naval gunboats attacked dozens of targets in the Gaza Strip and that Palestinian militants fired more than 20 rockets into Israel, slightly wounding a boy in the town of Ash­dod, wh­ere a home was damaged. Pales­tinian health officials said at least 20 people in Gaza were wounded.

Gaza toll hits 172 as Israeli campaign enters 7th day

But Israel did not carry out a threat to step up attacks against rocket-launching sites it said were hidden among civilian homes in the town of Beit Lahuiya after urging residents there to leave. A UN aid agency said around a quarter of the town’s 70,000 residents had fled.

Tel Aviv experienced a rare lull in morning rocket strikes, but they resumed during the evening rush hour, with the Iron Dome missile interceptor system going into action. Police said there were no casualties or damage.

Special missions

Hamas, the Islamist group which runs Gaza, said its armed wing had sent several locally-made drones to carry out “special missions” deep inside Israel.

A military spokesman said the drone was shot down near the port of Ashdod, about 25km north of Gaza, by a US-built Patriot missile, used largely ineffectively by Israel against Iraqi Scud missiles in the 1991 Gulf War.

An Egyptian-brokered truce doused the last big Gaza flare-up in 2012, and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told Egyptian President Abel Fattah al-Sisi in a phone call that his country was the most credible party capable of persuading both sides to stand down, an official Egyptian statement said.

But Cairo’s government is at odds with Hamas, complicating a mediation bid with the group, an offshoot of the now-outlawed Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.

Asked if Egypt was mediating, Foreign Ministry spokesman Badr Abdelatty said only that Cairo was “in close contact with the Israelis and all Palestinian factions as well as with regional and international countries”. He said he did not want to predict whether those efforts were moving Israel and Hamas close to a ceasefire.

Seventh day of warfare

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.

Hamas leaders have said a ceasefire must include an end to Israel’s Gaza blockade and a recommitment to the 2012 truce agreement. In addition, Hamas wants Egypt to ease restrictions it imposed at its Rafah crossing with the Gaza Strip since the military toppled Islamist president Mohamed Morsi last July.

Published in Dawn, July 15th, 2014