Israel repelled two underground infiltrations by Hamas militants into its territory from the Gaza Strip on Monday following a night of Israeli attacks that left a heavy toll of casualties in the Palestinian territory.
The Palestinian Health Ministry said the Palestinian death toll in the two-week-old Israeli offensive, aimed at destroying Hamas's cross-border tunnel network, rose by more than 80 during the night and now exceeds 500, with another 3,150 wounded. Many of the dead were killed in heavy Israeli shelling and airstrikes in southern Gaza, the ministry said.
Israeli tank shells struck a hospital in central Gaza on Monday, killing at last five people and wounding 60, including 30 medical staff. Twelve shells hit the Al Aqsa hospital in the town of Deir el-Balah, landing in the administration building, the intensive care unit and the surgery department, said Ashraf al-Kidra, a health official.
Hamas's predawn incursions came a day after Israeli troops pushed into a neighborhood of Gaza City to strike at the tunnels. The battle left 13 Israeli soldiers and 60 Palestinians dead on the bloodiest day of the conflict.
Israeli border surveillance detected a team of Palestinian militants emerging from a tunnel opening near the border and then a military aircraft targeted the fighters, the army said.
Shortly afterward, Hamas fighters emerged from a separate tunnel and fired an antitank missile at an Israeli armored vehicle, the army said. Soldiers returned fire, killing 10 militants, the army said.
Hamas's military wing, the Qassam Brigades, said it sent forces to attack targets in Israel east of the northern Gaza Strip village of Beit Hanoun and destroyed an Israeli military jeep during "very strong clashes."
Israel's Haaretz newspaper reported on its website that Israeli forces suffered some casualties in the second encounter. An Israeli army spokeswoman wouldn't comment on the report.
The army released two video clips of that incident, one showing a group of five militants in camouflage combat gear hunkered down in an overgrown field firing machine guns. A second clip showed the figures firing while running in the opposite direction, in what the army called a retreat into the tunnel.
"We heard a lot of a lot of gunfire of all kinds and bombing. We couldn't sleep," said Micha Ben Hillel, who lives on the nearby Nir Am kibbutz. "The tunnel opening was in a field where we used to have picnics."
Residents of the Israeli border kibbutzim of Nir Am and Erez were ordered to lock themselves in their houses Monday morning for fear the militants would reach the homes of the farming collectives, and the Israeli military police put up roadblocks on highways around Gaza's northwest corner.
The infiltrations were the fifth and sixth in five days. Military officials said they there may be dozens of cross border tunnels and have uncovered more than 10 during the current offensive.
The army said its offensive in Gaza was continuing Monday. Palestinian officials reported consistent shelling and many casualties in the southern Gaza cities of Rafah and Khan Younis during the night.
Ahsraf Al Kidra, the Palestinian Health Ministry spokesman, said 28 people died in a home flattened by an Israeli airstrike in Khan Younis; he said four people in the home survived. In Rafah, at the Egyptian border, nine members another family were killed, including seven children, the spokesman said.
The Israeli army said it was checking the report and had no immediate comment.
The sharply rising Palestinian casualty count also reflected the deaths overnight of some of those wounded Sunday in Gaza City. Eighteen Israeli soldiers have been killed, 13 of them in Sunday's battle, along with two Israeli civilians.
The United Nations said about three quarters of the Palestinian casualties have been civilians. The Israeli military said it had killed at least 80 militants since its ground forces entered Gaza last Thursday.
Following an emergency session late Sunday, the U.N. Security Council Sunday expressed "serious concern" about Gaza's rising civilian death toll and demanded an immediate end to the fighting.
