GAZA CITY, March 1, 2008 (AFP) - - Israel pressed its assault against the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip with a surge of strikes on Saturday, killing at least 33 Palestinians including four children, medical officials said.



Dr Muawiya Hassanein, head of Gaza emergency medical services, told AFP at least 33 people were killed, most of them by a "great number of rockets fired by Israeli planes" in northern Gaza.

Around 100 people were wounded, several of them critically, he said.

Two Israeli soldiers were among the dead on Saturday in Gaza, the Qatar-based Al-Jazeera news channel reported, but there was no immediate confirmation from the Israeli army.

Tanks supported by helicopters moved into the area in and around the crowded town and refugee camp of Jabaliya and the nearby Tufah neighbourhood in northern Gaza just after midnight, witnesses said.

By midday troops had pushed nearly three kilometres (two miles) inside the Gaza Strip, according to witnesses.

The urban battlefields were littered with debris as frightened residents hid inside their homes and imams read Koranic verses over mosque loudspeakers.

"We are in the middle of a total war. We hear the rockets and the explosions everywhere... we cannot leave our homes," Jabaliya resident Abu Alaa, 40, told AFP by telephone as he and his children took cover.

"They're shooting at everything that moves."

Elsewhere in Jabaliya news photographers were hemmed in by the fighting and came under Israeli fire, according to an AFP photographer that was trapped with them.

A Palestinian photographer for the local Media Group was lightly wounded when an Israeli shell exploded, an official with the agency said.

Saturday's high death toll makes it the deadliest raid on Gaza in well over a year and comes after a sharp four-day escalation of violence that has killed more than 60 people, including several children.

The latest dead include at least four children and three women, medics said, including a 12-year-old girl and her 11-year-old brother, who relatives said were killed by shrapnel as they slept.

Christopher Gunness, a spokesman for the UN agency for refugees (UNRWA), called "for an immediate ceasefire and political negotiations to end the fighting, which is impeding our humanitarian work.

"Those on both sides responsible for the killing of civilians must be held accountable," he said.

In the West Bank city of Ramallah about 300 Palestinians from all the major political factions marched through the streets, carrying pictures of children killed in recent Israeli strikes and banners slamming recent military assaults.

At least 12 militants were killed in Saturday's operation, 10 of them from the Islamist Hamas movement, including Abdelrahman Shihab, the son of Hamas MP Mohammed Shihab.

An Israeli army spokeswoman said troops had killed at least 15 Palestinian militants, "all of them planting explosive devices or shooting."

At least five Israeli soldiers were wounded, the army said.

Gaza militants meanwhile fired at least 40 rockets and mortars at southern Israel, including six long-range rockets that landed in and around the seaside town of Ashkelon some 11 kilometres (seven miles) north of Gaza, the army said.

Two children and a woman were lightly wounded in the Ashkelon strikes, it added.

Deputy Defence Minister Matan Vilnai told public radio on Saturday Israeli forces were engaged in an "enlarged operation," but denied it was the start of a major campaign aimed at partly reoccupying Gaza.

Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, whose forces were driven from Gaza in June when Hamas seized power in the territory, denounced the assault as "more than a holocaust."

"It's very regrettable that what is happening is more than a holocaust. We tell the world to see with its own eyes and judge for itself what is happening," he told reporters in Ramallah.

Abbas appeared to be referring to comments on Friday by Vilnai, who used the Hebrew word "shoah" -- generally used only for the Nazi Holocaust -- in remarks to army radio.

Senior Israeli political and military leaders have been mulling a major ground operation for months, as Palestinian militants have launched near-daily rocket and mortar attacks on southern Israel.

The latest deaths brought to at least 6,227 the total number of people killed in Israeli-Palestinian violence since 2000, most of them Palestinians, according to an AFP count.