Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that Israel’s Gaza offensive would continue as long as necessary, a day after an Egyptian call for a ceasefire and new truce talks.
Israeli air strikes killed 13 Palestinians in the besieged coastal enclave on Sunday and injured dozens more, bringing the total death toll to 2,111. The United Nations says 70 percent of the Palestinian victims were civilians, and that among the dead have been 478 children.
“Operation Protective Edge will continue until its aims are achieved … it may take time,” Netanyahu said of the offensive launched on July 8.
As of Sunday afternoon, Israel had carried out 27 strikes while 50 rockets were fired from Gaza, 47 of which hit Israel, an army spokeswoman said.
Five Palestinians were killed Sunday afternoon including three children when an Israeli airstrike hit a house in the Tal al-Zaatar neighborhood in the northern Gaza Strip, bringing the death toll since midnight to 13.
Witnesses told Ma’an reporter that an Israeli missile hit a house without any warning, killing five members of the family.
The new bloodshed came after Israel pounded Gaza with at least 60 strikes on Saturday, killing 10 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and bringing down a 12-story apartment block.
There was still no sign of either side adopting the ceasefire Egypt appealed for on Saturday to allow negotiators to return to Cairo to thrash out the details of a durable truce.
Since a previous round of frantic Egyptian diplomacy collapsed on Tuesday, shattering nine days of calm, 88 Palestinians and a four-year-old Israeli boy have been killed in the violence.
At a special cabinet session at the defense ministry in Tel Aviv, Netanyahu repeated his warning of harsh retribution for the death of the Israeli child on Friday in a rocket strike on a kibbutz near the Gaza border
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