At least 33 Palestinians have been killed in airstrikes and 50 injured, health officials in the Gaza Strip have said, in the deadliest single attack since fighting broke out between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas a week ago.
Air-raid sirens sounded for the seventh consecutive day across southern Israel as Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza launched more rocket attacks into the country – and reaching further – than in the entirety of the 2014 war.
In Gaza, rescuers raced to pull survivors and bodies from the rubble of three collapsed buildings on Sunday morning. According to photographs circulated by residents and journalists, the Israeli airstrikes created a crater that blocked one of the main roads leading to Shifa, the largest hospital in the Strip.
The morning strikes came after a night of heavy bombing. Reported efforts to agree a temporary ceasefire to allow medics in Gaza to recover people – alive and dead – from under collapsed buildings appeared in doubt.
In the burst of airstrikes early on Sunday, Israel also targeted the home of Yehya al-Sinwar, the most senior Hamas official in Gaza, who since 2017 has headed the group’s political and military wings, Hamas’s TV station said.
The hostilities, the worst in years, have so far killed 188 Palestinians and 10 people in Israel. Since the violence began on Monday, at least 55 children have been killed in Gaza, according to officials. On Saturday, Israeli airstrikes killed eight young cousins who had gathered to celebrate Eid with their mothers. Two Israeli children have died.
The latest moves came as Israel faced mounting international pressure to negotiate a ceasefire.
Reports in several Israeli newspapers quoted unnamed senior officials who said they believed pressure from Europe and the US meant that time for the continuing military assault may be running out. The UN security council is due to hold an emergency meeting to discuss the violence later on Sunday.
One of the strongest suggestions came on the Walla news website ahead of Sunday’s Israeli security cabinet meeting, where officials suggested international concern was being heard and that Israel would start moving toward a ceasefire.
The US envoy, Hady Amr, met the Israeli defence minister, Benny Gantz, for talks about ending the hostilities.
The efforts to bring an end to the violence came as it was reported that an Israeli attack on Hamas tunnels on Thursday night, which had been pitched as a huge success killing dozens of fighters who were lured into the so-called “metro” tunnel system, may have been far less successful than originally suggested.
Speaking late on Saturday, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said Israel was “still in the midst of this operation, it is still not over and this operation will continue as long as necessary”.
The White House said the US president, Joe Biden, had “reaffirmed his strong support for Israel” to defend itself in a phone call to Netanyahu on Saturday night, and also “raised concerns about the safety and security of journalists” after Israel bombed a 12-storey building on Saturday that had housed the US news agency the Associated Press.
Biden also spoke to the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, late on Saturday.
Hamas began its rocket assault on Monday after weeks of tensions over a court case to evict several Palestinian families in East Jerusalem, and in retaliation for Israeli police clashes with Palestinians near the city’s al-Aqsa mosque, Islam’s third holiest site, during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
Since then, Israel has launched more than 1,000 air and artillery strikes into the densely populated coastal strip, saying they were aimed at Hamas and other militant targets. Militants have fired more than 2,900 rockets into Israel during the same period, of which air defences have intercepted roughly a third, Israeli forces said.
The interception rate appeared to have dropped significantly since the start of the conflict, when Israel said 90% had been intercepted. The military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Hamas and the Islamic Jihad militant group have acknowledged that 20 of their members have been killed.
Overnight, sirens warning of incoming rocket fire went off in Tel Aviv and its suburbs and in southern Israel. About 10 people were injured while running for shelters, medics said.
Mediation efforts in the latest flareup of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are complicated by the fact that the US and most western powers do not talk to Hamas, which they regard as a terrorist organisation. Abbas, whose power base is in the occupied West Bank, exerts little influence over Hamas in Gaza.
Speaking to crowds of protesters in the Qatari capital of Doha, the Hamas chief, Ismail Haniyeh, said late on Saturday that the underlying cause of the hostilities was Jerusalem.
“The Zionists thought … they could demolish al-Aqsa mosque. They thought they could displace our people in Sheikh Jarrah,” said Haniyeh.
“I say to Netanyahu: do not play with fire,” he continued, amid cheers from the crowd. “The title of this battle today, the title of the war, and the title of the intifada, is Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Jerusalem.”
In Israel, the conflict has been accompanied by violence among the country’s mixed communities of Jews and Arabs, with synagogues attacked and Arab-owned shops vandalised.
There has also been an upsurge in deadly clashes in the occupied West Bank. At least 12 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli troops there since Friday, most of them during protests and confrontations.
