Soon after, a security source said five Gaza militants were killed in a shootout with troops in southern Israel. Hamas's armed wing claimed it killed 10 Israeli soldiers in a raid in the same area, and denied it lost any men. The latest bloodshed pushed the Palestinian death toll from violence in and around the coastal enclave to more than 1,050.
Palestinian medical sources blamed the refugee camp killings on the Israeli military, with witnesses saying the missiles had been fired from a fighter jet. "An F-16 fired five rockets at a street in Shati camp where children were playing, killing some of them and injuring many more," one told AFP.
Inside Shifa hospital, an AFP correspondent saw the bodies of at least seven children from the blast at the camp, with more bodies being brought in on bloodied stretchers. They were unloaded and taken directly to the mortuary. The Israeli military categorically denied any attack, and said Hamas had aimed the rockets at Israel but that they misfired and hit the camp.
It also blamed an early attack inside the compound of Gaza's biggest hospital on militant rocket fire that fell short of Israel and struck in the Palestinian territory. In Israel, at least four people were killed when a mortar round fired from Gaza hit an administrative building in the Eshkol regional council, media reports said, in what was the biggest civilian loss of life inside the Jewish state since the start of the violence.
The latest deaths came after a brief lull in the fighting in Gaza for the beginning of the Muslim festival of Eid al-Fitr, torpedoing hopes of a ceasefire despite intense international pressure for an end to the conflict. Following increasingly urgent calls by the UN and the US for an "immediate ceasefire," a senior source in the West Bank said Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas was heading to Cairo with Hamas representatives for fresh talks on ending the violence in Gaza.