At least 12 Palestinians died in fighting today as the Israeli army moved deeper into Gaza in its week-long military offensive to rescue a kidnapped soldier.
Militants firing anti-tank rockets clashed with Israeli soldiers in northern Gaza, after Israeli forces moved up during the hours of darkness into the vicinity of three deserted former Jewish settlements a mile from the Palestinian town of Beit Lahiya.
Six civilians were killed in an airstrike near Beit Lahiya, Palestinian medics said. Israel said it was checking the report. Earlier, a 20-year-old man was reported killed when an Israeli tank fired back at gunmen firing anti-tank rockets, the victim’s family said.
In addition, a Hamas militant group reported that two of its gunmen had been killed by Israeli tank fire, and a further Hamas militant was killed in an early morning air attack.
Elsewhere in Gaza, two died in an Israeli air-strike in southern Gaza after Israeli forces came under attack from anti-tank missiles and a rocket. Local doctors said that one was a militant and one was a civilian, although Israel said that both were gunmen.
The army's aim in moving up to the ruined settlements was to create a buffer zone, after Hamas militants used the rubble as cover to fire homemade rockets six miles over the Israeli border into the city of Ashkelon.
Staff from the Reuters news agency say that they saw tanks moving inside the western part of Beit Lahiya, where they confronted gunmen from Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a faction of President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah movement. Tanks and helicopter gunships fired towards militant positions, Reuters claimed.
But the army has denied that tanks were inside Beit Lahiya, and said that ground troops were doing most of the firing. The streets were largely deserted as frightened residents sheltered indoors.
Meanwhile, to the south, Palestinian officials reported that an Israeli aircraft had attacked a group of Palestinian militants, killing two people and wounding several others, believed to be civilians.
The army confirmed it had carried out an airstrike in Khan Younis after Israeli forces were attacked with seven anti-tank missiles and a rocket. Militants gathered around the area after the airstrike, taking up positions with grenade launchers.
The military incursion has put intense pressure on the Hamas-led Palestinian government to try to control the militants. Ghazi Hamad, the Palestinian government spokesman, said that the embattled administration was interested in solving the crisis caused by Shalit’s capture.
He told The Times: "We are suffering from a difficult situation. It's very dangerous. The Prime Minister, Foreign Minister and Interior Minister cannot move freely or normally now, because we expect anything from the Israelis. They have no red line. They can kill anyone.
"Before this we said we were interested in stopping all kinds of attacks from Gaza, and as a government we are ready to convince people to do it. But really, we need a very clear position from the Israelis, if they are ready to stop all attacks on our people.
"If you are daily destroying buildings and the government and institutions, what do you expect?"
Mediation efforts have failed to free Corporal Gilad Shalit, a young Israeli soldier, who was kidnapped on June 25 in a cross-border raid by Palestinian militants, including a group linked to the ruling party, Hamas. Israel has also dismissed demands of a prisoner swap for his release.
The military today said that Israeli forces would remain several kilometres inside northern Gaza "until the completion of their mission".
Amir Peretz, the Israeli Defence Minister, said that although Israel quit Gaza last year after 38 years of occupation, "no one should see that as a guarantee that we cannot reach territory in which we feel we have no choice but to operate".
He denied that troops risked getting bogged down in fighting. "We have no intention of sinking into the Gaza swamp," he added.
A spokesman for Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minister, has said that the offensive will not amount to re-occupying parts of the strip long-term.
Hamas rockets hit Ashkelon, a city of 115,000, yesterday and the day before. It was the furthest point yet to be hit by the home-made Palestinian missiles, which cause few casualties but spread panic.
The two-engine Qassam rocket - an upgrade on previous single-engined models which have a range of less than six miles - that hit on Tuesday was fired from the rubble of former Jewish settlements, the army said.
Today an emergency session of the United Nations' Human Rights Council deplored Israel’s operations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as a breach of humanitarian law.
By a vote of 29-11 with five abstentions, the council approved the resolution proposed by the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference after it was amended to suggest the Palestinians also had a responsibility to refrain from violence against civilians.
"It is absolutely unacceptable" that the resolution only names Israel, Israeli Ambassador Itzhak Levanon told the AP news agency.
Switzerland had earlier proposed amendments saying armed Palestinian groups also should be called to account in the resolution. But the council accepted instead a more vague Islamic conference amendment that "urges all concerned parties to respect the rules of international humanitarian law, to refrain from violence against the civilian population and to treat under all circumstances all detained combatants and civilians in accordance with the Geneva Conventions."
The resolution expressed "deep concern" over the "arbitrary arrest of Palestinian (Cabinet) ministers, members of the Palestinian Legislative Council and other officials as well as the arbitrary arrests of other civilians; and military attacks.
The council heard John Dugard, a South African human rights expert responsible for investigating alleged human rights abuses by Israel in Palestinian areas, say that it was clear that Israel was in violation of the most fundamental norms of humanitarian law and human rights law.
Mr Dugard said he had "every sympathy" with Corporal Shalit, but that Israel’s response has only increased its violations of the Geneva Convention on the treatment of occupied people.
Israel’s ambassador to the UN’s European headquarters in Geneva called the session "a planned and premeditated" attack on his country.
