A 12-year-old girl who saw her family blown apart by a shell as they sunbathed on a beach at Gaza buried her father and stepmother, a brother and three sisters yesterday.

Huda Ghalia was seen on Friday’s news bulletins standing over the body of her father Ali, 45, and wailing “Daddy, Daddy” after the stray Israeli shell exploded in the midst of their Mediterranean picnic.

Yesterday she was clearly in shock, overwhelmed by grief and barely able to cry. “I will see him in heaven,” she said softly. “My father has died. I saw my family in a dream.”

Slightly injured in the head from the blast, she felt her legs give way as she tried to walk to her uncle’s house to bid her father farewell. She hugged his body and repeated simply: “My father has died.”

Then she accompanied his body, along with those of her stepmother Raeisa, 35, her five-month-old baby brother Haitham and her sisters Hanadi, aged 18 months, Sabreen, 8, Ilham, 18, and Aliah, 25, on their funeral procession through the Gaza Strip.

Thousands of mourners wept with her as she was supported on the march by the remaining members of her family, who include her mother and three of her brothers and sisters. Three other siblings were seriously injured when the shell thumped into the beach during the family’s first outing of the summer.

Huda was said to have escaped injury because she was in the sea. “Daddy, daddy, forgive me,” she cried as she knelt to kiss her father at the cemetery in the northern Gaza town of Beit Lahiya. Then she begged loved ones around her: “Please don’t leave me alone.”

Militants fired into the air and vowed to avenge the deaths.

The blast, which injured more than 30 people, seemed to have destroyed any hopes of an early move towards peace in the Middle East. This weekend Israel was braced for a renewed terrorist onslaught. Intelligence sources indicated that a Palestinian revenge suicide attack could be imminent.

Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, left instructions to step up security in Israel’s cities before leaving today to meet Tony Blair in London. According to a Palestinian security source, all Gaza’s militant groups are intent on retaliation.

“It is not a matter of war or peace,” said the source, who is close to the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas. “We’re talking about blood revenge — Israeli citizens will pay for the stupidity of their leaders.”

A statement by Hamas, the fundamentalist Islamic party that won the Palestinian elections earlier this year, said: “The Israeli massacres represent a direct opening battle, and that means the earthquake in the Zionist cities will resume.”

Film of the blast’s aftermath and Huda’s cries for her father were repeatedly broadcast, further raising tensions.

The Israeli authorities launched an investigation and promised that anybody proved to have acted “negligently” would be punished. “Harming innocent civilians is totally unacceptable. We will do whatever we can to avoid civilian loss of life,” said a foreign ministry spokesman, Mark Regev.

“What we were trying to do is to stop the daily volleys of rockets from Gaza into our civilian communities inside Israel. Unfortunately, we have a situation where the Palestinian government does nothing to prevent the launching of rockets.”

A provisional report on the explosion will be presented to the Israeli cabinet today. Israel’s army acknowledged that one of its shells may have hit the beach by accident.

“Five out of six of the shells we fired in the area fell where we wanted them to,” Brigadier-General Yair Kochavi told Israeli Army Radio.

Hamas retaliated with a barrage of Qassam-2 rockets fired at Israel yesterday hours after calling off an unofficial truce that had begun 16 months ago.

Tensions had already been running high in Gaza after the funeral of Jamal Abu Samhadana, the founder of the Popular Resistance Committees, who was killed in an Israeli attack on Thursday.

Despite the bloodshed, Abbas ordered a referendum to be held on July 26 on a proposal for an independent Palestinian state, alongside Israel, on all of the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank. The move is opposed by Hamas, which does not recognise Israel.

Olmert dismissed the referendum as “meaningless”, putting into doubt the prospects for negotiations with Abbas that will be urged on him at his meeting in Downing Street.

The tragedy in Gaza will cast a pall over Olmert’s talks with Blair, who is expected to ask him to drop plans for a “unilateral realignment” of Israel’s borders. This would mean withdrawing from some parts of the West Bank but leaving settlers in areas defined without agreement from the Palestinians.

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