Cairo (AFP) - A Palestinian delegation including Hamas agreed joint demands Sunday to present to Egyptian mediators in Cairo for a truce with Israel, including an end to the Gaza blockade, officials said.

The delegation, which includes members of president Mahmud Abbas's Palestinian Authority and Gaza's Hamas rulers, will meet the Egyptian mediators later on Sunday.

Cairo will then relay the demands to Israel, which baulked at sending negotiators after accusing Hamas of breaching a 72-hour truce moments after it began on Friday.

The Palestinians, who met earlier on Sunday to hammer out a joint position, agreed on "a ceasefire; Israeli troop withdrawal from Gaza; the end of the siege of Gaza and opening its border crossings," said Maher al-Taher, a member of the delegation.

The Palestinian demands also include fishing rights up to 12 nautical miles off Gaza's coast and the release of Palestinian prisoners demanded by Hamas and Abbas, said Taher, a senior official with the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

A Hamas official confirmed the agreement, saying: "These are the main points, but they must be discussed with the Egyptians. We hope things go smoothly."

Cairo, a traditional broker in Palestinian-Israeli conflicts, has moved to isolate Hamas on its eastern border after the Egyptian military overthrew the Islamist government last year.

Egypt had proposed an unconditional ceasefire followed by talks between Israel and Hamas early into the 27-day conflict, which has claimed the lives of more than 1,800 Palestinians, most of them civilians, according to an emergency services spokesman in Gaza.

Since the fighting began, 66 Israelis have been killed, 64 of them soldiers.

Hamas had rejected the initial Egyptian initiative, saying it was not consulted and that that plan did not guarantee an end to Israel's eight-year blockade of Gaza.

Analysts say the Islamist militants will be hard-pressed to emerge from the devastating conflict with a political victory that Israel is determined to deny them.s

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) — Israel withdrew most of its ground troops from the Gaza Strip on Sunday in an apparent winding down of the nearly monthlong operation against Hamas that has left more than 1,800 Palestinians and more than 60 Israelis dead.

Even as Israel said it was close to completing its mission, heavy fighting raged in parts of Gaza, with at least 10 people killed in what U.N. and Palestinian officials said was an Israeli airstrike near a U.N. shelter. The United States lashed out at Israel, saying it was "appalled" by the "disgraceful" attack.

And with Hamas officials vowing to continue their fight, it remained uncertain whether Israel could unilaterally end the war.

Israel launched its military operation in Gaza on July 8 in response to weeks of heavy rocket fire, carrying out hundreds of airstrikes across the crowded seaside territory. It then sent in ground forces July 17 in what it said was a mission to destroy the tunnels used by Hamas to carry out attacks.

Hamas has fired more than 3,000 rockets into Israel during what has turned into the bloodiest round of fighting ever between the two enemies.

Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, an Israeli military spokesman, confirmed the bulk of ground troops had been pulled out of Gaza after the military concluded it had destroyed most of the tunnel network.

Airstrike Hits UN School in GazaPlay Video

He said Israel had detected some 30 tunnels that were dug along the border for what he called a "synchronized attack" on Israel.

"We've caused substantial damage to this network to an extent where we've basically taken this huge threat and made it minimal," he said. The army had thousands of troops in Gaza at the height of the operation.

In southern Israel, armored vehicles could be seen rolling slowly onto the back of large flatbed trucks near the Gaza border, while soldiers folded flags from atop a tank and rolled up their belongings and sleeping bags.

Lerner said, however, that the operation was not over and that Israel would continue to target Hamas' rocket-firing capabilities and its ability to infiltrate Israel.

The Israeli military said early Monday it would hold fire for a seven-hour "humanitarian window" beginning at 10 a.m. (0700 GMT), saying the truce would not apply to areas where troops were still operating. The military said it would respond to any attacks during that time.

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Smoke rises after an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City, Sunday, Aug. 3, 2014. (AP Photo/Dusan Vranic)

While Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to press on against Hamas, he is coming under international pressure to halt the fighting because of the heavy civilian death toll.

U.N. officials say more than three-quarters of the dead have been civilians, including the 10 people killed Sunday at a U.N. school that has been converted into a shelter in the southern town of Rafah.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called the attack a "moral outrage and a criminal act" and demanded a quick investigation, while the U.S. State Department condemned the strike in unusually strong language.

According to witnesses, Israeli strikes hit just outside the main gates of the school. The Red Crescent, a charity, said the attack occurred while people were in line to get food from aid workers. Gaza health official Ashraf al-Kidra said in addition to the dead, 35 people were wounded.

Robert Turner, director of operations for the U.N. Palestinian refugee agency in Gaza, said the building had been providing shelter for some 3,000 people. He said the strike killed at least one U.N. staffer.

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Palestinian mourners weep as they identify the lifeless body of 9-year-old Rajab Al Shrafi, at the m …

"The locations of all these installations have been passed to the Israeli military multiple times," Turner said. "They know where these shelters are. How this continues to happen, I have no idea."

Inside the U.N. school's compound, several bodies, among them children, were strewn across the ground in puddles of blood. "Our trust and our fate are only in the hands of God!" one woman cried.

The Israeli military said it had targeted three wanted militants on a motorcycle in the vicinity and was "reviewing the consequences of this strike."

In the current round of fighting, U.N. shelters have been struck by fire seven times. UNRWA, the U.N. agency that assists Palestinian refugees, says Israel has been the source of fire in all instances. But it also has said it found caches of rockets in vacant UNRWA schools three times.

Israel accuses Hamas of using civilian areas for cover and says the Islamic militant group is responsible for the heavy death toll because it has been using civilians as "human shields."

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Israeli soldiers mourn over the grave of Israeli Army 2nd. Lt. Hadar Goldin during his funeral at th …

Israeli artillery shells slammed into two high-rise office buildings Sunday in downtown Gaza City, police and witnesses said. Al-Kidra said more than 50 Palestinians were killed, including 10 members of one family in a single strike in the southern Gaza Strip.

Israel said that it attacked 63 sites on Sunday and that nearly 100 rockets and mortars were fired at Israel.

Also Sunday, the Israeli military said it found three motorcycles in one of the tunnels leading to Israel. It said the vehicles were meant to facilitate an attack against Israelis and help militants get around more quickly.

Israeli officials said the military would reduce its ground activities in Gaza but would respond to continued attacks from Gaza with airstrikes.

"It's not a withdrawal," Israeli Cabinet minister Amir Peretz told Channel 10 TV. "It's setting up a new line that is a more controlled line with the air force doing its work."

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Palestinians, wounded in an Israeli strike at a house in Beit Lahiya, northern Gaza Strip, lie on th …

In Gaza, Hamas officials said they would not halt the rocket fire without an end to an Israeli blockade of the territory that has devastated the local economy. Israel imposed the blockade in 2007, saying the measures are needed to keep Hamas from arming.

"If Israel stops unilaterally, Hamas will declare victory and will not grant any security or truce to Israel," said one senior official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was discussing internal Hamas deliberations. "In this case, we are going to live under a war of attrition until a political solution is found."

In Cairo, Egyptian and Palestinian negotiators held talks over a potential cease-fire. After accusing Hamas of repeatedly violating humanitarian cease-fire arrangements, Israel said it would not attend the talks and there was "no point" in negotiating with the militant group.

Meanwhile, the Israeli military death toll rose to 64 after Israel announced that Hadar Goldin, a 23-year-old infantry lieutenant feared captured in Gaza, was actually killed in battle. Some 15,000 people attended his funeral Sunday.

Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon revealed on his Facebook page Sunday that he is a distant relative of Goldin and had known him his whole life. The information was previously kept under wraps while Goldin was feared abducted.

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Federman reported from Jerusalem. Yousur Alhlou in Jerusalem, Ibrahim Barzak in Gaza City, Mohammed Daraghmeh in Ramallah, West Bank, and Maggie Michael in Cairo contributed reporting.

An overloaded ferry sank in rough conditions in central Bangladesh on Monday with up to 200 passengers on board, in the latest disaster to hit the country's rivers.

Emergency workers said around 100 survivors and two dead bodies had been pulled out of the river, but the rest remain unaccounted for.

"The waves were huge, the ferry was rolling heavily from side to side," said survivor Syed Saadi, whose wife and two sons were still missing.

"The boat flooded with water after a huge wave hit it, and tipped over before sinking under the water," he told Channel 24 television.

The ferry was around 30 kilometres (20 miles) south of the capital Dhaka when it sank on the river Padma in the central district of Munshiganj.

Ferry accidents are common in the impoverished country, with overcrowding and poor ship design and maintenance often to blame.

Local police chief Tofazzal Hossain told AFP the vessel was overloaded with passengers and conditions were rough.

The police chief of Madaripur, where the ferry began its journey, said it was carrying between 170 and 200 passengers.

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Map of Bangladesh locating the area where a ferry carrying up to 200 passengers sank Monday (AFP Pho …

But one survivor, speaking on local television, said there were up to 350 passengers on board.

"There was no storm, but the weather was cloudy and the river was rough. The waves were huge," he said.

"Suddenly the ferry was hit by a wave and flooded with water. I got out through a window and the ferry sank quickly.

"I was rescued by a local motor boat, other people were also rescued by boats."

Bangladeshi ferries do not maintain passenger logbooks, and are often overloaded.

Emergency workers at the scene said thousands of onlookers had gathered on the banks of the swollen river Padma, in the district of Munshiganj, where the boat sank.

August is monsoon season in Bangladesh, when rivers run high, and the ship was completely submerged.

"Our divers are going to locate the sunken ferry and start the rescue operations," Mohammad Dulal of the fire service told AFP.

Bangladesh, one of Asia's poorest nations, is criss-crossed by more than 230 rivers and boats are the main form of travel, especially in the southern and northeastern regions.

However many of the vessels in use date back to before independence in 1971.

Officials have said more than 95 percent of Bangladesh's hundreds of thousands of small and medium-sized boats do not meet minimum safety regulations.

In May, a passenger ferry thought to be carrying between 150 and 200 people sank in central Bangladesh, killing dozens of people. The exact death toll remains unknown.

Survivors blamed the ship's captain for refusing to take shelter from a gathering storm.

Around 150 people were killed in the same district in March 2012 after an overcrowded ferry carrying about 200 passengers sank when it was hit by an oil barge in the middle of the night.

Bangladesh ferry capsizes with up to 200 aboard

Two bodies are found as rescue teams pull about 100 people to safety.
Remaining passengers unaccounted for

By Nidal al-Mughrabi and Maayan Lubell

GAZA/JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Palestinians accused Israel of breaking its own ceasefire on Monday by launching a bomb attack on a refugee camp in Gaza City that killed an eight-year-old girl and wounded 29 other people.

Gaza Health Ministry spokesman Ashraf Al-Qidra said the strike on a house in Shati camp took place after the truce was scheduled to start on Monday morning.

An Israeli military spokeswoman said she was checking the report.

Israel announced a seven-hour ceasefire to facilitate the entry of humanitarian aid and allow some of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced by an almost four-week-old war to go home.

The announcement met with suspicion from Gaza's dominant Hamas Islamists and followed unusually strong censure from Washington at the apparent Israeli shelling on Sunday of a U.N.-run shelter that killed 10 people.

An Israeli defence official said the ceasefire, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. (0700 to 1400 GMT), would apply everywhere but areas of the southern town of Rafah where ground forces have intensified assaults after three soldiers died in a Hamas ambush there on Friday.

"If the truce is breached, the military will return fire during the declared duration of the truce," the official said.The official said east Rafah was the only urban area in which troops and tanks were still present, having been withdrawn or redeployed near Gaza's border with Israel over the weekend.

Mark Regev, spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said Israel's goal was "to assist with the humanitarian relief" of the people of Gaza.

"Unfortunately, I understand that Hamas has publicly rejected the ceasefire, and that would be the eighth ceasefire that Hamas has rejected," he said on CNN.

Hamas, whose envoys are in Egypt for truce negotiations that Israel has shunned in anger at Friday's ambush in Rafah, saw a possible ruse in the humanitarian truce announcement.

Hams said attacking the house after the Israeli ceasefire began was evidence that the truce was for media consumption only. "We urge our people to continue to be cautious," said the group's spokesman, Sami Abu Zuhri.

Israel is winding down its offensive in the absence of a mediated disengagement deal with Hamas. It says the army is close to completing the main objective of the ground assault - destruction of cross-border infiltration tunnels from Gaza - and is prepared to respond to Palestinian attacks.

The Israeli chief military spokesman said forces were deployed along both sides of the Gaza border.

"Redeployment lets us work on the tunnels, provides defence (of Israeli communities nearby) and lets the forces set up for further activity. There is no ending here, perhaps an interim phase," Brigadier-General Motti Almoz told Army Radio.

In a predawn air strike Israel killed Danyal Mansour, a senior commander of Islamic Jihad, a Palestinian group fighting alongside Hamas.

Israel launched its offensive on July 8 following a surge in Hamas rocket salvoes. It escalated from air and naval barrages to overland incursions centred on Gaza's tunnel-riddled eastern frontier but also pushing into densely populated towns.

Gaza officials say 1,797 Palestinians, most of them civilians, have been killed and more than a quarter of the impoverished enclave's 1.8 million residents displaced. As many as 3,000 Palestinian homes have been destroyed or damaged.

"DISGRACEFUL SHELLING"

Many of those evacuees have taken shelter in U.N.-run facilities, including a Rafah school where 10 people were killed on Sunday in what Gaza officials said was an Israeli air strike.

Israel said it was investigating the incident and that it may have been linked to an attempt by the military to kill Islamic Jihad gunmen, as they drove nearby.

International outcry crested against the Israelis.U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon described the attack as a "moral outrage and a criminal act" and called for those responsible for the "gross violation of international humanitarian law" to be held accountable.

The United States said it was "appalled" by the "disgraceful shelling" and urged its Middle East ally to do more to prevent harm to civilians. Washington also called for an investigation into other, similar attacks on U.N. schools in Gaza.

Israel says it makes every effort to avoid non-combatant casualties and that Hamas invites these by launching rockets from, and entrenching gunmen inside congested civilian areas.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office said Hamas had turned U.N. facilities into "terrorist hot spots". The main U.N. agency in Gaza, UNRWA, says it has found rockets in three of its schools.

Israel has lost 64 soldiers in combat and three civilians to Palestinian cross-border shelling that has emptied many of its southern villages. Iron Dome interceptors, air raid sirens and public shelters have helped stem Israeli casualties.

Egyptian truce mediation, supported by the United States and the United Nations and also involving Qatar, Turkey and Western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, has been complicated by the dramatically divergent terms set by Israel and Hamas.

Israel has said Gaza must be stripped of tunnels and rocket stocks. Hamas rules this out, and demands an easing of the crippling Gaza blockade enforced by both Israel and Egypt, which consider the Palestinian Islamists a security threat.

In Cairo on Sunday, Palestinian delegates said they also wanted Israel to quit Gaza, facilitate reconstruction of the battered territory and release Palestinian prisoners.

The Israelis, however, have shown little interest in resuming negotiations after blaming Hamas for violating Friday's truce with the Rafah ambush - an accusation echoed by the United States and the United Nations, though disputed by Hamas.

(Writing by Dan Williams; Editing by Giles Elgood)

Palestinians accuse Israel of breaking truce

Gaza officials say Israel violated its own cease-fire by bombing a refugee camp and killing an 8-year-old girl.
29 others wounded

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) — An Israeli airstrike killed a militant leader in the Gaza Strip Monday, just hours ahead of a seven-hour truce announced by Israel that was meant to open a "humanitarian window" for aid as Israeli forces draw down ground operations in the coastal territory.

However, the military said the cease-fire would not apply to areas where troops were still operating and where they would respond to any attack. The southern strip town of Rafah, which saw particularly heavy fighting on Sunday, was excluded from the truce, the military said.

Shortly after the cease-fire went into effect at 10 a.m. (0700 GMT), two Israeli missiles struck a beach house near Gaza City, killing one person and leaving up to 20 people missing, the Red Crescent and a Gaza health official said. The Israeli military had no immediate comment on the strike.

The Islamic Jihad group — a close ally of Gaza's militant Palestinian Hamas rulers — said its commander in the northern part of the strip, Daniel Mansour, died when an Israeli strike hit his home just before dawn.

Even though Israel has been drawing down its ground operation since the weekend, it has kept up heavy aerial, offshore and artillery bombardments of the strip. The Gaza war, now in its fourth week, has killed more than 1,800 Palestinians and more than 60 Israelis.

Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said the group was skeptical about the Israeli truce announcement. "We do not trust such a calm and call on our people to take caution," Zuhri said.

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Palestinian parents carry their son, whom medics said was wounded by an Israeli air strike, at a hos …

Israel launched the military operation in Gaza on July 8 in response to weeks of heavy rocket fire. It has since carried out more than 4,600 airstrikes across the crowded seaside area. On July 17, it sent in ground forces in what it said was a mission to destroy the tunnels used by Hamas to carry out attacks inside Israel.

Since the fighting erupted, Hamas has fired more than 3,200 rockets into Israel, many of them intercepted by Israel's Iron Dome defense system. In contrast to Israel's high-tech warfare, which includes precision-guided missiles and large payload ordinance, Hamas's rocket technology remains relatively primitive and has not been as deadly.

Overnight, Israeli forces carried out new airstrikes while Israeli tanks and navy gunboats fired dozens of artillery shells, targeting houses, agricultural plots and open areas, Gaza police said. They said Israeli jet fighters destroyed three mosques, nine houses, five seaside chalets and a warehouse for construction material.

The Gaza police said Israeli navy boats also approached the northern coast of the strip and soldiers tried to land in the area. On the ground, there were clashes in the southern town of Rafah and southeast of Gaza City, they said. The Israeli military had no immediate comment.

U.N. officials say more than three-quarters of the dead in the war have been civilians, including the 10 people killed Sunday at a U.N. school that has been converted into a shelter in the southern Gaza Strip town of Rafah.

Israeli Army To Halt Attacks, Hamas Vowing To Cont …Play Video

The United States said it was "appalled" by the "disgraceful" shelling and State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki called on Israel to do "more to meet its own standards and avoid civilian casualties."

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called the attack on the school a "moral outrage and a criminal act" and demanded a quick investigation.

According to witnesses, Israeli strikes hit just outside the main gates of the school on Sunday. The Red Crescent, a charity, said the attack occurred while people were in line to get food from aid workers. Gaza health official Ashraf al-Kidra said in addition to the dead, 35 people were wounded.

Robert Turner, director of operations for the U.N. Palestinian refugee agency in Gaza, said the building had been providing shelter for some 3,000 people. He said the strike killed at least one U.N. staffer.

"The locations of all these installations have been passed to the Israeli military multiple times," Turner said. "They know where these shelters are. How this continues to happen, I have no idea."

Israel said that it attacked 63 sites on Sunday and that nearly 100 rockets and mortars were fired at Israel.

Al-Kidra, who also reported the casualty toll in Monday's strike on the Gaza beach house, said more than 50 Palestinians were killed Sunday, including 10 members of one family in a single strike in the southern Gaza Strip.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has come under international pressure to halt the fighting because of the heavy civilian death toll.

U.N. shelters in Gaza have been struck by fire seven times in the latest Israeli-Hamas round of fighting. UNRWA, the U.N. agency that assists Palestinian refugees, says Israel has been the source of fire in all instances. But it also has said it found caches of rockets in vacant UNRWA schools three times.

Israel accuses Hamas of using civilian areas for cover and says the Islamic militant group is responsible for the heavy death toll because it has been using civilians as "human shields."

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Enav reported from Jerusalem.