Israel's prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is to halt the Israeli bombardment of Gaza as Egypt's prime minister visits the territory.
Hamas interior ministry spokesman Islam Shahwan said there had been 130 strikes overnight, including one which struck an interior ministry building. Around 300 rockets have been sent over the border from Gaza into Israel.
The Jerusalem Post reported that the home of Hamas Prime Minster Ismail Haniyeh was bombed by the Israel Air Force overnight Thursday, though the Hamas leader was not home during the strike, a move which the paper called "a significant escalation in the IAF's targeted assassination policy."
Palestinian firefighters try to extinguish a fire at the Civilian Affairs branch of the Ministry of Interior following an Israeli air raid in Gaza City
The Israel Defence Force has called-up 30,000 army reservists, sparking concern the army could be about to launch a ground offensive, something Israeli media is openly speculating about.
“IDF Chief of General Staff Benny Gantz has authorised the army’s regular units to prepare for a ground operation,” IDF Spokesman Yoav Mordechai told Israel's Channel 2.
Palestinian women react during the funeral of Hisham Al Galban, a Hamas militant killed in an Israeli attack, in Khan Younis, southern Gaza
Egyptian Prime Minister Hisham Kandil is leading a three-hour delegation to Gaza to lay the groundwork for a potential ceasefire, and Netanyahu is to call off any Israeli attacks during the visit "on the condition that there won't be fire from Gaza into Israel during that period."
It is the first visit to the Gaza Strip by an Egyptian prime minister.
The strikes have killed 19 Palestinians, seven of them militants, but six of them children and a pregnant woman.
One of the dead in Gaza was the 11-month-old son of a BBC Picture Editor Jihad Misharawi.
Ultra Orthodox Jewish men and woman attend the funeral of Mirah Sharf who was killed in the southern town of Kiryat Malachi by a rocket
A Palestinian rocket killed three Israelis, also one including pregnant woman, in the town of Kiryat Malachi on Thursday.
Two rockets from Gaza landed near Tel Aviv, but cause no damage, with one landed in an uninhabited suburb, another in the sea.
Daniel Taub, the Israeli ambassador to the UK, said Hamas needed to accept "some basic ground rules", which meant acknowledging the right of Israel to exist and renouncing violence.
Speaking on ITV's Daybreak, he said: "It is hard to think of Israel as a thug because really what characterises Israel's behaviour over the last ten years is astonishing restraint.
"It is hard to think of any country where one million people, a seventh of the population, would sit, repeatedly forced to go into bomb shelters, repeatedly forced for their kids not to go to school, because you have Hamas firing hundreds and hundreds of missiles."
He added: "Ideally what we want to see is a peace treaty. That's why we have been trying to deal with the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, where we have been saying 'come to the negotiating table'.
"Unfortunately in Hamas in the Gaza Strip we have a group that is hell-bent on the destruction of Israel."
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