GAZA CITY: Exchanges of fire killed eight Palestinian children in a Gaza refugee camp and four people in Israel on Monday, shattering hopes for an end to three weeks of devastating violence.

The missile that slammed into a public playground in the seafront Shati UN refugee camp also killed at least two other people and wounded another 46, many of them also children, the emergency services said.

Soon after, a security source said five Gaza militants were killed in a shootout with troops in southern Israel. Hamas’s armed wing claimed it killed 10 Israeli soldiers in a raid in the same area, and denied it lost any men.

The latest bloodshed pushed the Palestinian death toll from violence in and around the coastal enclave to more than 1,050.

Palestinian medical sources blamed the refugee camp killings on the Israeli military, with witnesses saying the missiles had been fired from a fighter jet.

“An F-16 fired five rockets at a street in Shati camp where children were playing, killing some of them and injuring many more,” one source said.

Inside Shifa hospital, a correspondent saw the bodies of at least seven children from the blast at the camp, with more bodies being brought in on bloodied stretchers. They were unloaded and taken directly to the mortuary.

Published in Dawn, July 29th, 2014