‘No safe place for civilians’ in Gaza, UN says

On Tuesday, Israeli strikes killed neraly 40 people in Gaza –– 13 of them women and children amid a flurry of diplomatic talks as world leaders seek to bring an end to the conflict entering its third week.

Women and children take shelter in a hair dresser shop after the Al Jazeera office was hit by several Israeli rockets in Gaza City July 22,2014. Heidi Levine for The National

GAZA CITY // Palestinian civilians in densely-populated Gaza have no place to hide from Israel’s military offensive and children are paying the heaviest price, the United Nations said on Tuesday.

Israel pounded targets across the Gaza Strip, saying no ceasefire was near as US and UN diplomats pursued talks on halting fighting that has claimed more than 600 Palestinian lives as the conflict entered its third week.

“There is literally no safe place for civilians,” Jens Laerke, spokesman of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), said in Geneva.

The death toll is rising in the coastal enclave which has an estimated 4,500 people per square kilometre, he said.

Nearly 500 homes have been destroyed by Israeli air strikes and 100,000 people have sought shelter in schools of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), where they need food, water and mattresses.

“This number continues to increase by the hour,” UNRWA said, raising its emergency funding appeal to US$115 million from $60m.

On Tuesday, Israeli strikes killed neraly 40 people in Gaza –– 13 of them women and children.

A child and three women, one of them pregnant, were killed in two separate Israeli air strikes in Zeitun, in the central Gaza Strip, and Beit Hanoun, in the north, emergency services spokesman Ashraf al-Qudra said.

An elderly woman and her brother were among those killed in three separate raids targeting Bureij and Al Maghazi in central Gaza, and Rafah in the south.

In Tel Aviv, a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip landed near Israel’s main airport on Tuesday, wounding one Israeli and prompting international airlines to cancel flights to Israel in a reflection of high anxiety over air travel after last week’s attack on a Malaysian jet over Ukraine.

It was the latest blow to Israel on a day when it announced that a soldier, who Hamas militants claimed they had kidnapped, was dead and his body remains unaccounted for.

The army named the soldier, whose body is still missing, as Oron Shaul, two days after Hamas said they had kidnapped an Israeli soldier of the same name.

The Israeli military said two more of its soldiers had been killed in the fighting a day earlier, bringing the overall Israeli death toll to 29, including two civilians.

Palestinian militants have fired more than 2,000 rockets toward Israel, and several heading toward the area of Ben-Gurion Airport have been intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome defence system, but police spokeswoman Luba Samri said Tuesday’s landing was the closet to the airport since fighting began on July 8.

The rocket damaged a house and lightly injured one Israeli in Yehud, a Tel Aviv suburb near the airport, Samri said.

As a result, Delta Air Lines and United Airlines suspended service between the US and Israel indefinitely.

US Airways scrapped its one flight to Tel Aviv, while Germany’s Lufthansa and Air France also suspended flights.

Israel’s Transportation Ministry called on the companies to reverse their decision and said it was trying to explain that the airport was “safe for landings and departures”.

* Reuters, Agence France-Presse and Associated Press