Use of unmanned aircraft is first reported deployment by Hamas

Israel said it shot down a drone from Gaza a week into its offensive on Monday, the first reported deployment of an unmanned aircraft by Palestinian militants whose rocket attacks have been regularly intercepted.

Hamas, the Islamist group that runs Gaza, said its armed wing had sent several drones to carry out "special missions" deep inside Israel - a development which, if confirmed, would mark a step up in the sophistication of its arsenal.

More than 166 Palestinians have been killed, Gaza health officials said, in seven days of fighting that has shown no sign of ending.

Israeli aircraft and naval gunboats attacked 204 targets in the Gaza Strip overnight, the Israeli army said, in the worst flare-up in Israeli-Palestinian violence in nearly two years. Health officials said at least 20 people were wounded.

Palestinian militants fired more than 20 rockets into Israel, causing no casualties, the Israeli military added.

The Israeli military said the drone was intercepted near the port of Ashdod by a US-built Patriot missile, used largely ineffectively by Israel against Iraqi Scud missiles in the 1991 Gulf War.

The force was trying to locate debris in the area about 25 km north of Gaza, and determine whether it had carried explosives.

There was no sign of any sharp escalation of Israeli attacks in the northern Gaza Strip, where Israel threatened on Sunday to step up strikes against rocket-launching sites in parts of the town Beit Lahiya and urged thousands of its residents to leave.

A UN aid agency said around a quarter of Beit Lahiya's 70,000 residents have fled deeper into the Gaza Strip. Al-Mezan, a Gaza-based Palestinian human rights group, said 869 Palestinian homes have been destroyed or damaged in Israeli attacks over the past week.

Diplomatic efforts

US Secretary of State John Kerry, whose bid to broker a wider Israeli-Palestinian peace deal collapsed in April, offered on Sunday to help secure a Gaza truce.

The call was echoed by France and by Germany, which were scheduled to send their foreign ministers to the region on Monday. But with the United States and the European Union, like Israel, shunning Hamas as a "terrorist" group, Middle Eastern intermediaries were mooted.

An Egyptian-mediated truce doused the last big Gaza flare-up, an eight-day war in 2012. Cairo is now again seeking calm, but its military-backed government is at odds with Islamist Hamas, complicating any mediation efforts.

Qatar and Turkey have also been suggested as possible truce brokers.

Gaza health officials said 138 civilians, including at least 30 children, were among the dead.

There have been no fatalities in Israel since border hostilities intensified on July 8. Israel's Iron Dome anti-missile system has intercepted many of the rocket salvoes.

But the persistent rocket fire has disrupted life in major cities, paralyzed vulnerable southern towns and triggered Israeli mobilization of troops for a possible Gaza invasion if the Palestinian rockets persist.

While allowing that a diplomatic solution could eventually be found, an Israeli official said Israel would, for now, pursue its military offensive "to restore quiet over a protracted period by inflicting significant damage to Hamas and the other terrorist groups in the Gaza Strip".

Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the second-most potent Gaza faction, said they would not accept a mere "calm for calm" where both Palestinian fighters and Israeli forces stand down.

"Netanyahu began this crazy war, and he must end his war first," Hamas leader Izzat Al-Reshiq told Al-Arabiya television.

(China Daily 07/15/2014 page12)