JABALIYA, Gaza Strip (AFP) - At least 24 Palestinians and three Israelis were killed in fierce battles in the northern Gaza Strip during a massive army raid which Israel vowed would be an open-ended operation.
In the latest bloodshed, at least seven Palestinians were killed when an Israeli tank shell landed on a group of people standing near the entrance to the embattled Jabaliya refugee camp, Palestinian hospital sources said.
"What you have seen today is going to continue," Avi Pazner, a spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told AFP. "We have not put a time-limit on it."
Speaking shortly after a top-level meeting involving Israel's top political and military officials, Pazner said the army would "go in deeper and in a more comprehensive way" to stop rocket attacks by the Islamic radical group Hamas.
Sharon was locked in further top-level meetings late Thursday and was also expected to convene his security cabinet, army radio said.
The raid, launched late Tuesday, intensified late Wednesday after a Palestinian rocket launched from northern Gaza killed two young children in the Israeli town of Sderot as families were celebrating Sukkot, the Jewish Feast of Tabernacles.
It was the deadliest violence in the Gaza Strip since May when dozens were killed on both sides as Israel sought to destroy tunnels used by Palestinian militants to smuggle weapons from Egypt.
Among Thursday's dead were two Israeli soldiers and a Jewish settler woman.
Israeli radio said Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz had decided to carry out a large-scale ground operation which would not be limited by time, in an effort to halt Palestinian rocket attacks.
It said the army was considering temporarily re-occupying the territory and could mobilize reserve troops.
Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority urged the international community to intervene at once and put an end to Israel's "massacres" in the Gaza Strip, according to an aide to the Palestinian leader.
The narrow streets of the impoverished Jabaliya camp, home to 100,000 people, resembled a battlefield and hospitals were put on an emergency footing to treat the flow of casualties.
Dozens of militants armed with assault rifles, hand grenades and rocket-propelled grenades hid in alleys, away from Israeli snipers posted on rooftops.
Loud explosions could be heard as troops and militants engaged in intense exchanges of fire. More than 20 houses and the outside wall of a school were destroyed by the army.
The UN agency for Palestinian refugees warned that the Israeli operations had disrupted its operations and called on the Jewish state to guarantee the safety of its staff.
Following a series of overnight air raids on northern Gaza, fierce clashes broke out early Thursday, and peaked in the mid-afternoon when the tank shell crashed into a group of mostly teenagers and children at the entrance to Jabaliya camp.
Apart from the seven killed, another 24 people were wounded in the strike, 10 of them seriously.
An Israeli military source confirmed troops had fired a tank shell at a "densely-populated market near a school in Jabaliya" after two incidents in which militants had used the area as cover to attack troops.
The latest violence raised the death toll to 30 Palestinians and five Israelis since the army moved en masse into the area on Tuesday.
It also raised to 4,385 the overall number of people killed since the start of the Palestinian intifada, or uprising, four years ago. They include 3,361 Palestinians and 953 Israelis, according to an AFP count.
At least eight of the Palestinian casualties killed Thursday were armed militants engaged in fierce gunbattles with troops in Jabaliya and the nearby town of Beit Hanun.
Another two Palestinian gunmen were shot dead after they killed an Israeli settler woman and a soldier near Alei Sinai settlement. The army said the second soldier was killed in a grenade attack, and three others lightly injured in clashes.
The other Palestinian victims, killed by snipers and tank shells in and around the Jabaliya camp, were all believed to be unarmed civilians, including at least three teenagers.
Close to 100 Palestinians have been wounded in the ongoing raid, among them a cameraman who was in serious condition after being hit by gunfire.
Despite the heavy presence of troops in the area, another two Qassam rockets were fired at Sderot late Thursday, damaging a local factory but causing no injuries, the army said.
Senior Hamas official Said Siam said the launching of rockets against Sderot was "a legitimate act of self-defence against (Israel's) aggression. "Our mujahadeen (fighters) will only stop firing rockets if the aggression stops," he said.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell said in an interview with Al-Jazeera television aired on Thursday that the uprising had done nothing for the Palestinians and urged them to put an end to it.
"What is the intifada in its five years of existence? What has it accomplished to the Palestinian people? Has it produced progress toward a Palestinian state? Has it defeated Israel on the battlefield?" Powell asked.