Israel, Palestinians battle in most serious Gaza violence

GAZA: Israel carried out more air strikes on the Gaza Strip on Tuesday as Palestinians kept up rocket fire on Israeli territory in the worst surge of violence since a 2014 war.

The fighting - which has killed six Palestinians, five of them militants, and a Palestinian man in Israel since Monday -threatened to derail efforts by the United Nations, Egypt and Qatar to broker a long-term ceasefire and head off another major conflict in the impoverished, densely populated enclave. Hamas, Gaza’s dominant Islamist movement, and other armed factions fired over 400 rockets or mortar bombs across the fenced border after carrying out a surprise guided-missile attack on Monday on a bus that wounded an Israeli soldier, the military said. The salvoes were the fiercest since the seven-week Gaza war in 2014 between Israel and Gaza militants.

Hamas said it was retaliating for a botched Israeli commando raid in Gaza that killed one of its commanders and six other gunmen on Sunday. An Israeli colonel was also killed in that incident. In Gaza City, people gathered in front of a large mound of debris that was once a multi-floor structure. It was flanked by five-storey buildings still standing after the air strike, their shattered stone facades adding to the tall pile of rubble. In the Israeli coastal city of Ashkelon, a video shot by a resident showed a bleeding woman, lying in the debris of an apartment and covered by dust, weakly raising her arm.