Region

VIENNA — Iranian nuclear talks were hanging in the balance six days before a deadline to get a historic deal, after intensive talks on Monday described by US Secretary of State John Kerry as “very tough”.

“We are in the middle of talks about nuclear proliferation and reining in Iran’s programme, it is a really tough negotiation I will tell you,” Kerry said during a second day of high-stakes discussions in Vienna.

He said later: “We are working, we are working very hard. Serious discussions. [It was a] good meeting.”

Kerry was due to give a news conference on Tuesday morning, a US official said, and it was unclear whether he would hold any more discussions with Zarif.

Egyptian state media reported that Kerry would leave Vienna on Tuesday to visit the country in an effort to broker a truce in Gaza.

The mooted nuclear accord would kill off for good fears that Iran might develop nuclear weapons under the guise of its civilian programme after a decade of rising tensions and threats of war.

Iran denies seeking the atomic bomb and wants the lifting of crippling UN and Western sanctions.

The five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany have been negotiating almost non-stop for months, after sealing an interim accord in November under which Iran froze its uranium enrichment in return for about $7 billion in sanctions relief.

But the talks to nail down a full treaty have met major sticking points, particularly on how much of Iran’s nuclear programme to dismantle.

Both sides are also under intense domestic pressure.

Zarif will have to come up with a deal that satisfies Iran’s hardline Islamic leaders, while Kerry is under pressure from Congress ahead of November mid-term elections not to concede too much.

No breakthrough Sunday 

Kerry, along with the foreign ministers of France, Germany and Britain, and the deputy foreign minister of China jetted into the Austrian capital on Sunday seeking to inject some momentum.

But the three European ministers left with no apparent breakthrough.

“It is now up to Iran to decide to take the path of cooperation... I hope that the days left will be enough to create some reflection in Tehran,” Germany’s Frank-Walter Steinmeier said before leaving Vienna.

“The ball is in Iran’s court.”

Britain’s Foreign Secretary William Hague said it was “very important for Iran to be more realistic”.

Hague said there had been no “decisive breakthrough” on Sunday and a “huge gap” remained on the key issue of uranium enrichment.

This activity can produce fuel for the country’s sole nuclear plant or, if further enriched, the material for an atomic bomb.

The six powers want Iran to reduce dramatically the scope of its enrichment programme, while Tehran wants to expand it.

Israel, the Middle East’s sole if undeclared nuclear armed state and which together with Washington has refused to rule out military action, is opposed to any enrichment by Iran.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned Sunday that any deal leaving Iran with the capability to pursue enrichment activity would be “catastrophic”.

Iranian negotiator Abbas Araqchi was Sunday publicly sticking by Iran’s position on enrichment which he called “clear and rational”.

“As the supreme guide said, the enrichment programme has been planned with the real needs of the country in mind, meaning our need to ensure reactor fuel.”

If no agreement is reached by next Sunday when the six-month interim accord runs out, all sides can agree to extend the talks for a further six months.

Washington however insists it will only consider such a move if Iran makes serious concessions first.

“We have a few days left, and our efforts are to narrow the gaps and get an agreement by then,” Michael Mann, spokesman for lead negotiator and EU foreign policy head Catherine Ashton, said Monday.

“We’re still aiming for July 20. We still have some time.”

ANKARA — The president of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region met Turkish leaders in Ankara on Monday, as Turkey closely watches moves for an independent Iraqi Kurdistan amid the chaos in its conflict-torn neighbour.

Massud Barzani met President Abdullah Gul and then went into talks with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in what officials said was a show of a support by Ankara for the Iraqi Kurdish authorities in their stand-off with the government in Baghdad.

Territorial gains by the self-proclaimed jihadist Islamic State (IS) — formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant — in Iraq have alarmed regional states and sparked calls for Kurdish autonomy to counter the radical Islamist threat.

In an interview this month, Barzani said Iraq’s Kurds would hold an independence referendum within months, adding that the time was right for a vote as Iraq was already effectively divided by the IS actions in Iraq.

“This visit that comes at a time that Prime Minister Nuri Al Maliki is pressuring Kurds is a very important message,” a Turkish official told AFP.

Maliki, a Shiite, has accused the autonomous Kurdish region of harbouring radical militants, in comments that drew sharp response from Arbil which said the prime minister had become “hysterical” and should quit.

Sunni-majority Turkey has in the past accused the Maliki government of stoking sectarian tensions.

‘No more tough words’ 

Turkey, which has its own sizeable Kurdish minority, has said it is committed to the territorial integrity of Iraq and officially remains opposed to the notion of Kurdish independence.

But in recent years, Ankara has enjoyed burgeoning trade ties with Iraq’s Kurdistan region, particularly on oil, while Erdogan has also moved to end the conflict with Kurdish rebels at home and grant Turkish Kurds greater rights.

Analysts say that Turkey is now far less hostile to the notion of an Iraqi Kurdistan than when Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party  came to power over a decade ago.

Barzani also remains key to peace talks between Turkey’s secret services and Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan who has been serving a life sentence since 1999 on an island prison off Istanbul.

“Nobody should expect us to make tough words [on Kurdish independence] like we did in the past,” another Turkish official told AFP.

“We are still against the idea of an independent Kurdistan. There’s no change in our position but there is a change in our rhetoric.”

 ‘A sustainable business’ 

Turkey’s Energy Minister Taner Yildiz also joined talks between Erdogan and the Kurdish delegation including Ashti Hawrami, the minister of natural resources, a ministry official told AFP.

In May, Turkey began exporting oil from Iraqi Kurdistan to international markets, drawing Baghdad’s ire.

Media reports claimed the Iraqi Kurdish delegation was in Turkey to collect its share of oil revenues deposited into an escrow account at state-owned Halkbank.

But Yildiz denied the reports, saying revenues from the first tanker sale of oil had not yet been received.

Turkey was criticised by the central government in Baghdad when it started to facilitate the transfer of oil pumped from Iraqi Kurdistan to world markets.

Baghdad, which insists it has the sole right to develop and export the country’s natural resources, has lodged an arbitration case against Ankara, accusing the government of being “driven by greed”.

BEIRUT — At least 16 fighters were killed in clashes between Syrian rebels and Lebanon’s Shiite group Hizbollah on the Lebanese border over the weekend, a monitoring group said Monday.

“Seven members of Hizbollah were killed and 31 wounded” in the clashes which raged from Saturday until Sunday night, said Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

He told AFP that the Syrian rebels lost nine fighters and 23 of them were wounded in the battle waged in an undemarcated area of the border between Qalamun in Syria and Lebanon’s Arsal.

Hizbollah initiated the showdown in a bid to rid the region of rebel fighters following a string of daily clashes, said Abdel Rahman.

“But they fell into an ambush by rebels... before Hizbollah reinforcements arrived and the fighting intensified,” he said, adding that the Shiite group captured 14 rebels.

Giving a higher death toll of eight Hizbollah fighters killed, a wounded member of the Shiite group told AFP on condition of anonymity: “The battle was very fierce, and at very close quarters.”

The long and porous border region is often used by smugglers, refugees and fighters.

Arsal and the area around it are largely Sunni Muslim, and residents sympathise with the Sunni-led uprising against Syrian President Bashar Assad.

In April, Syrian forces backed by allied fighters from Hizbollah retook control of most of the Qalamun region.

But Syrian activists say hundreds of opposition fighters have taken refuge in the caves and hills in the border area, using it as a rear base from which to launch attacks inside Syria.

Last month, Lebanese army forces carried out raids in the area targeting militants with ties to “terrorist groups”, an army statement said at the time.

BEIRUT — A Sunni extremist group in Syria took over opposition-held areas of a provincial capital near the border with Iraq on Monday after expelling rival fighters from an Al Qaeda-linked group, activists said.

The march by militants of the Islamic State group on the city of Deir Al Zour brings them closer to a showdown with President Bashar Assad’s forces. They recently captured cities and towns in northern Iraq and merged them with much of the territory under its control in eastern Syria.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said militants from IS took over the area from fighters of the rival Al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front group, who withdrew after clashes.

The new developments effectively expand and consolidate areas held by fighters from the Islamic State group in territory straddling the border between the two conflict-ridden countries of Syria and Iraq.

The group, which now controls large parts of northern Syria, is almost in full control of oil-rich Deir Al Zour province in the east, stretching from the Syrian border town of Boukamal to the provincial capital to the northwest. Assad’s forces still control half of Deir Al Zour city, and no fighting between his troops and the extremist group was reported there.

Led by an ambitious Iraqi militant known as Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, the Islamic State group unilaterally declared the establishment of an Islamic state, or caliphate, in the lands it has seized in Syria and Iraq. It proclaimed al-Baghdadi the head of its new self-styled state and demanded that all Muslims pledge allegiance to him.

Most significant Syrian rebel groups that have been fighting to overthrow Assad have rejected Al Baghdadi’s declaration. The rebel groups, including the Nusra Front, have fought the extremist group since the beginning of the year. Nearly 7,000 people, mostly fighters, have died in the infighting, and tens of thousands of civilians have been forced from their homes.

However, Nusra Front appears to be losing the war within a war in Syria as fighters allied with powerful tribes in the country’s east defect to Al Baghdadi’s group.

The Syrian conflict began in March 2011 as largely peaceful protests against Assad’s rule, but turned into an armed revolt after some opposition supporters took up weapons to fight a brutal government crackdown on dissent. It deteriorated into civil war in which Islamic extremists, including foreign fighters and Syrian rebels, who have adopted hardline Al Qaeda-style ideologies, have played an increasingly prominent role among the fighters, dampening the West’s support for the rebellion.

Also Monday, the UN Security Council unanimously approved a resolution authorising cross-border delivery of desperately needed food and aid to Syrians in rebel-held areas, without government approval.

The resolution expressed “grave alarm at the significant and rapid deterioration of the humanitarian situation in Syria” and deplored the fact that its previous demands for humanitarian access “have not been heeded” by the Syrian government and opposition fighters.

The council adopted a resolution in February demanding that all sides in the conflict allow immediate access for aid, lift the sieges of populated areas, stop depriving civilians of food and halt attacks against civilians. But monthly reports to the council since then by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on its implementation have described an increasingly dire situation.

Just hours before the resolution was adopted, some 13 Syrian Red Crescent trucks loaded with 1,000 food parcels crossed into the rebel-held Damascus suburb of Moadamiyeh, which has been besieged by government troops for more than two years, causing widespread hunger-related illness and death among its residents.

In Yarmouk, a Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus that has been under government siege for over a year, UN aid workers were not allowed to distribute aid on Monday, UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness said in a statement, adding that 18,000 civilians remain trapped there in desperate need of food and medicine.

The interruption follows a week of sustained food distribution in Yarmouk during which the UN agency that helps Palestinian refugees in the Middle East distributed food parcels to 3,316 families, Gunness said.

GAZA CITY — Hundreds of millions of football fans watched Sunday’s World Cup final by simply getting comfortable in front of their TV sets. In the Gaza Strip, under Israeli bombardment for six days, fans needed ingenuity and courage to witness Germany’s 1-0 win over Argentina.

Since the Israeli offensive against Gaza’s ruling Hamas began, the streets of the territory have been deserted after nightfall, with the loud thuds of intermittent bombings heard across wide areas. Compounding the hardships, rolling power cuts have plagued Gaza for several years, leaving hundreds of thousands at a given time without electricity.

Salah Yousef, a 19-year-old Argentina supporter, said he walked to his uncle’s house, about 20 minutes away, to watch the game because his own home didn’t have electricity.

“I was scared when I walked,” Yousef said. “My mother was on the phone talking to me until I reached their home.”

Yousef said doing something normal, such as watching football, is a show of defiance.

“This means we don’t fear the Israeli threats and fire,’” he said, speaking by phone from his uncle’s house where he and seven relatives watched the game.

Close to 184 Palestinians have been killed and more than 1,100 have been wounded in more than 1,300 Israeli air strikes since the start of the bombardment, some of them targeting homes of senior Hamas activists in crowded residential neighbourhoods. Israel says the bombing campaign is meant to diminish Hamas’ ability to fire rockets at Israeli communities.

Israel says Gaza fighters have fired more than 800 rockets at Israel over the past seven days.

During the World Cup final, sirens warning of rocket fire wailed in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon, near Gaza, sending residents running to bomb shelters. The army said seven rockets were fired at Ashkelon during the game, but were all intercepted by Israel’s anti-missile shield.

In nearby Or Haner, a Kibbutz near the Gaza border home to many expat Argentinians, members watched the game in their own homes with bomb shelters nearby instead of communally due to security warnings of too many convening together in one place.

“We want Messi not missiles,” Gerardo Salom, an Argentina fan said.

In Gaza, many watched games in outdoor coffee shops and seaside hotels during the last World Cup. In contrast, an Israeli missile hit a beachside café last week as patrons watched the Argentina-Netherlands semifinal, killing nine people aged from 15 to 28.

Raed Lafi, a local journalist, watched the game on his cell phone with his six children crowding around him because the power in his home was out.

He said he watched the last World Cup on a large screen in an outdoor cafe, but preferred to stay at home this time.

“I live in a very dangerous area, surrounded by [Hamas] security compounds” that might be targeted by Israel, he said.

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Three Israeli Jews arrested for the murder of a Palestinian teenager have confessed to abducting him and burning him alive, officials said on Monday, an incident that helped trigger a week of Israeli-Hamas fighting around the Gaza Strip.

Easing a court gag order on the case, Israel said the suspects, two of them minors, had told interrogators that in killing Mohammed Abu Khdeir they sought revenge for the murder of three Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank last month.

The names of the suspects, remanded by an Israeli court pending a formal indictment, were not immediately given.

Tensions escalated around the two incidents. More than 184  Palestinians, most of them civilians, have been killed by Israeli action against Gaza, run by the Hamas group. Hundreds of rockets have been fired from Gaza into Israel.

The adult suspect facing the gravest allegations might plead mitigation in citing past mental illness.

“I expect soon to get the investigative material, in which I will look for support for the assessment there is a complex problem in the matter of of my client’s criminal culpability,” an attorney for Honenu, an ultranationalist legal aid organisation, said.

According to Israel’s Shin Bet security agency, in the early hours of July 2, as Muslims marked the end of the daylight Ramadan fast, the three suspects “patrolled Arab neighbourhoods of Jerusalem for a number of hours, in an attempt to find a victim to abduct, until they spotted Mohammed Abu Khdeir”.

Bundling him into their car, they drove to a forest outside the city where the 29-year-old suspect beat him on the head with a tyre iron (wheel brace) and, helped by the two 17-year olds, doused him with fuel and lit it, the Shin Bet said.

Israeli prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who had blamed Hamas for the killing of the Jewish youths and launched a crackdown against the Palestinian Islamist group, deplored Abu Khdeir’s murder as “loathsome”. He ordered security forces to find the culprits swiftly and pledged to see them prosecuted to the full.

GAZA CITY  — The target was the Gaza police chief. He survived the Israeli air strike on a cousin’s home with critical injuries, but 18 family members were killed, including five children and teens.

The weekend attack highlighted Israel’s broad definition of military targets in its current offensive against the Islamist group Hamas. The army says those targets include senior Hamas activists and their homes, even as it insists it is doing the utmost to spare bystanders by warning them to clear out.

However, the UN Office for Humanitarian Affairs said Sunday that civilians made up the majority of Palestinian casualties over the past seven days. And a human rights researcher said some of Israel’s strikes appear to have violated rules of war.

The issue of Israel’s targets cuts to the core of conflicting narratives.

Palestinians — and not just those loyal to Hamas — say Israel is punishing all of Gaza’s 1.7 million people and is killing civilians with impunity. The situation in Gaza “has become unbearable”, Western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, a longtime rival of Hamas, said Sunday.

Israel has portrayed its offensive against Hamas as self-defence, saying it is trying to halt the group’s indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israeli communities. Gaza fighters have fired more than 800 rockets over the past week, disrupting life in large parts of the country but so far causing no deaths, according to the Israeli military.

A senior army commander said Sunday that Israel is trying to cause maximum damage to Hamas, which seized Gaza in 2007 and seeks Israel’s destruction. The military sometimes holds back because of concern for civilians, said the officer who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity, citing military regulations.

“I could kill a lot more Hamas commanders, but the way I’m operating now is consistent with my values and my conscience,” he said.

Trying to highlight its attempts to warn civilians, the military released a recording of a phone call to a resident in an area about to be targeted. The caller is heard saying he is speaking on behalf of the Israeli army.

“You speak Hebrew? Excellent,” he says to the Palestinian on the other line — in Hebrew. He then urges residents to clear out because a house is about to be targeted. “In five minutes, we are bombing,” the Israeli says.

Members of the extended family of Taysir Al Batsh, the police chief in Gaza, said they did not receive any call before Israel flattened the two-storey home of one of the chief’s cousins late Saturday, just as worshippers streamed out of a nearby mosque after evening prayers.

Batsh was in stable condition Sunday at Gaza City’s Shifa Hospital. Eighteen of his relatives were killed, said D. Ayman Sahabani at Shifa.

Among the dead were the owners of the home, Majed and Amal Al Batsh, their seven children ranging in ages from 13 to 28, and a two-year-old granddaughter, according to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights. Also among the dead were two more children, ages 7 and 12, and a 17-year-old from other branches of the clan.

Clan member Kamel Al Batsh, 22, said he heard the strike while he was in the mosque and then rushed to the scene.

“In a second, the place became a mass of dust and destruction, mixed with blood and body parts,” he told a radio station.

“My cousins who I used to play with... shared joy and sad moments with, have gone,” Batsh said. “What did we do for them to target our clan? Is it because of Uncle Taysir? He was not hiding. From the first day, he was working all day long in the street. He is the police commander who cared about people safety and stability.”

An Israeli army spokesman, Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, said the police chief had been a target but that other fighters were also in the area. Lerner said it was not clear if a warning was given before the strike and that the military is looking into the matter.

Lerner accused Hamas of using civilians as human shields.

“Hamas chooses to operate and hold the civilian population of Gaza hostage,” he said. “If they have a command-and-control room and next door is a living room, they are jeopardising everyone in that building.”

However, the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem said Israel is overreaching.

“Official spokespeople state that it is enough for a person to be involved in military activity to render his home [and his neighbors’ homes] legitimate military targets, without having to prove any connection between his activity and the house in which he and his family live,” B’Tselem said. “This interpretation is unfounded and illegal.”

Palestinian human-rights groups in Gaza said Israel has directly targeted at least 171 homes since the start of the offensive.

The military would only say that in addition to rocket-launching sites and weapons-storage facilities, it struck 32 “Hamas leadership facilities, 29 communications infrastructures and additional sites used for terrorist activities”.

Bill van Esveld of the New York-based group Human Rights Watch said that in some cases, Israel appears to have violated the rules of war under which parties to the conflict can only target military objects using proportionate force.

“We’ve looked into several cases that look like unlawful attacks,” he said. “And we’re very concerned by other attacks with high numbers of civilian casualties, often attacks on homes.”

BAGHDAD — Iraq’s parliament failed on Sunday to break a political deadlock that is holding up the formation of a new government to tackle an Islamist-led insurgency raging less than 80km from Baghdad.

After a brief session, parliamentary officials put off until Tuesday efforts to reach agreement between Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish politicians on the posts of prime minister, president and parliamentary speaker.

Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki, whose State of Law coalition is the largest individual list in parliament, is seeking a third term but faces opposition from Sunnis and Kurds who say he has ruled for the Shiite majority at the expense of minority communities. Even rival Shiite parties want to unseat him.

The political impasse has been given added urgency by the Islamist-led insurgency which swept through Sunni provinces of northern Iraq last month, encouraging Maliki’s opponents to try to force his departure.

Bomb attacks struck the capital and its outskirts after the inconclusive session.

A blast near a busy street in the southwestern district of Bayaa killed three people and wounded seven, police and hospital sources said. In Yusifia, 15km south of the capital, a bomb went off near a crowded market, killing another three people, medics and police said.

‘Jeopardising Iraq’s unity’

The disagreement over Maliki’s future appeared to be blocking progress on the other political posts.

Sunni politicians said the main Sunni bloc put forward Salim Al Jabouri, a moderate Islamist, as their candidate for speaker, but accused Maliki of effectively torpedoing their proposal by linking it to their acceptance of his bid for a third term.

“We have presented our candidate for speaker and done what we should do,” said outgoing speaker Osama Nujaifi. “We hold the other blocs responsible for the delay.

“Once we manage to complete the democratic process to form the government, this would help to stop the great destruction happening in Iraq, which is jeopardising the country’s unity.”

An arrest warrant on terrorism charges was issued in 2011 against Jabouri, who was serving on parliament’s human rights committee at the time. He had confronted Maliki over abuses against prisoners in special jails in the fortified Green Zone of central Baghdad where parliament is also located.

The charges were dropped after the April election amid rumours that Jabouri would back Maliki to remain as prime minister. But Saleh Mutlaq, a prominent Sunni politician, said that kind of deal would be rejected by many of his fellow Sunni lawmakers.

“We have presented Salim Al Jabouri and Maliki put a condition — in order to approve Jabouri as speaker, he himself should be approved as prime minister,” he said. “This is something we don’t accept.”

Iraq’s political elite are under pressure from the United States, the United Nations and Iraq’s own Shiite clerics to reach agreement so politicians can deal with the insurgency and prevent the country fragmenting on sectarian and ethnic lines.

The UN special envoy to Iraq, Nickolay Mladenov, said the country could plunge into chaos if parliament failed to move forward on a government in Sunday’s session. Violent deaths last month reached more than 2,400 — a level comparable to the worst of the bloodshed seen during Iraq’s 2005-2008 sectarian war.

Two-hundred and thirty-three out of 328 deputies attended Sunday’s short meeting, a significant improvement on the July 1 session, when only a third turned up. 

Fallujah fighting

With politics in Baghdad paralysed, and Maliki continuing in a caretaker role, the fighting has raged on. Shelling and helicopter fire killed eight people and wounded 14 in the city of Fallujah, west of Baghdad, a hospital spokesman said.

Militants from the Al Qaeda offshoot now known as the Islamic State seized swathes of Iraq’s northern provinces in a two-day offensive last month and have consolidated their grip in western Iraq in places such as Fallujah, which they overran in January.

The Sunni Islamist insurgents attacked the town of Dhuluiya, about 70km north of Baghdad, early on Sunday, seizing local government buildings, police and witnesses said.

They said militants in 50 to 60 vehicles stormed the town at 3:30am (0030 GMT), taking the mayor’s office and municipal council building and trying to capture the police station. Police and local tribes were fighting them, the sources said, and four police, two militants and two civilians were killed.

Maliki’s military spokesman said the army had retaken the towns of Sadur, Nawfal and parts of Muqdadiya after days of fighting in the area, northeast of Baghdad.

He was speaking a day after government forces launched an assault to repel Islamic State militants from a military base on the edge of Muqdadiya, which the rebels had attacked with artillery, mortars and captured tanks and Humvees.

In the predominantly Sunni town of Ishaqi, 100km north of Baghdad, a roadside bomb exploded on Sunday afternoon outside the home of a police major general, killing four members of his family, local police said.

GAZA CITY — Israel harshened its campaign against Gaza Sunday, warning Palestinians in the north to flee after marines mounted a ground attack, and diplomatic efforts to halt the bloodshed intensified.

As world powers prepared to meet over the spiralling bloodshed, the Palestinian death toll from the punishing Israeli air campaign hit 166, with another 1,120 people wounded, the emergency services said.

Despite increasing calls for a ceasefire, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the military was hitting Hamas "with growing force", warning there was no end in sight.

"We do not know when this operation will end," he told ministers.

And Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said he would ask UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to "put the State of Palestine under the UN international protection system" in order to address the violence in Gaza.

As the death toll from the six-day campaign spiralled, the Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights said most of the victims were civilians, putting the number at more than 130, among them 35 children and 26 women.

It also said Israel had targeted 147 homes and badly damaged hundreds of others.

So far, no Israelis have been killed, although fighters in Gaza have pounded the south and centre of the country with more than 690 rockets since the fighting began on July 8. More than 150 have been intercepted.

Overnight, Israeli naval commandos staged a brief ground assault in northern Gaza on a mission to destroy longer-range rockets, with the army warning residents to leave the area ahead of a major assault on the sector.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a senior Israeli military official said the area was rife with rocket launchers and would be targeted in an operation which would begin during the evening. 

Nobody's rockin' 

With multiple air raid sirens sending thousands of Tel Aviv residents fleeing for shelter, concert organisers announced Sunday the cancellation of a highly-anticipated Neil Young gig which had been scheduled to take place in Tel Aviv on Thursday.

"This is due to the rocket attacks of recent days and the fear for the audience's safety in a mass event," concert promoter Shuki Weiss wrote on his Facebook page.

Meanwhile in northern Gaza, even before the army's warnings went out, thousands of residents were fleeing for their lives after a night of traumatic violence, an AFP correspondent reported.

"It was the middle of the night, and I gathered the children, they were so afraid," said Samari Al Atar, breaking down in tears as she described how her family fled barefoot with shooting all around.

Many sought refuge in eight schools run by the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, where some 4,000 people had taken cover, UNRWA's head of operations Robert Turner told reporters.

"More are arriving by the minute. They are mostly fleeing areas in the north," he said. UNRWA facilities have the capacity to shelter up to 35,000 people, a spokesman said.

Saturday's death toll was the highest yet with 56 people killed, including 18 people who died in a single strike on a house in Gaza City, medics said.

The blast levelled the building and sheared the facade off a neighbouring structure, exposing a kitchen and a fridge with its door ripped off, full of food and drink.

"It is a disaster," said 17-year-old Mohammed Abu Aisha as he stared at the devastation.

So far neither side has shown any interest in talk of a ceasefire, with top diplomats from Britain, France, Germany and the United States due to discuss truce efforts in Vienna later on Sunday.

Pope Francis appealed to world leaders for both prayer and diplomacy to halt the bloodshed, while the German and Italian foreign ministers were both poised to head to the region to join truce efforts, their offices said.

As the fighting showed no sign of let-up, thousands rallied across Asia to denounce the Israeli offensive and show support for Palestinians, with 3,000 gathering and hundreds more in Hong Kong, New Delhi and Jakarta.

No rush into ground assault  

Israel has warned that preparations are under way for a possible ground incursion, with Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman saying a decision was expected later Sunday, at a meeting of the security Cabinet.

But commentators said Israel was not in a rush to begin a ground operation.

"Despite the convoy of tanks heading south and the infantry brigades massing near the border with Gaza, it is obvious that Israel is in no hurry for the operation's ground phase," Amos Harel wrote in Haaretz newspaper, saying the aim was to "first exhaust diplomatic options".

The latest escalation began on June 12 when three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped and murdered, triggering a crackdown on Hamas in the West Bank and an uptick of rocket fire from Gaza, which worsened after a Palestinian teen was killed by Jewish extremists on July 2.

WASHINGTON — US Attorney General Eric Holder said he is concerned fighters from Europe and the United States who are supporting violent insurgents in the Syrian civil war are joining forces with Yemeni bomb makers.

“In some ways, it’s more frightening than anything I think I’ve seen as attorney general,” Holder said on ABC’s “This Week”, broadcast on Sunday.

US intelligence agencies estimate around 7,000 of the 23,000 violent extremists operating in Syria are foreign fighters, mostly from Europe.

Holder, who last week met with European justice ministers in London, said the worry is not only about the actions of foreign fighters in Syria, but when they return to their home countries.

Extremists have tried to recruit Westerners and send them back home with a mission. US Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson has said Syria has become a matter of homeland security.

The FBI has dozens of investigations under way on American fighters who have gone to Syria and made their way home, Holder said.

Intelligence that bomb makers in Yemen have been joining forces in Syria with the foreign fighters is particularly concerning, he added.

“That’s a deadly combination, where you have people who have the technical know-how along with the people who have this kind of fervor to give their lives in support of a cause that is directed at the United States and directed at its allies,” Holder said in the interview that was recorded last week.

A Nigerian man who attempted to detonate explosives on a flight from Amsterdam to Michigan in 2009, and who became known as the underwear bomber, was linked to an extremist group that operates in Yemen.

Last week, Holder urged countries in Europe and elsewhere to do more to keep their citizens from travelling to Syria to fight, saying they could learn from US efforts to conduct undercover sting operations.

Holder said Sunni extremists flowing into Iraq from Syria who have seized towns in the North do not yet represent a threat to the West. But that could change.

“If they are able to consolidate their gains in that area, I think it’s just a matter of time before they start looking at the West and at the United States in particular,” he said.

Earlier this month, a Denver woman accused of trying to fly to Syria to support insurgents there was arrested in the United States, and last month two men in central Texas were arrested on similar charges.

One of the Texas men was charged with “attempting to provide material support to terrorists”, violating a law that Holder urged other countries to copy.