Day 13 was the bloodiest so far. More than 100 Palestinians were killed in heavy bombardment and street battles in Gaza on Sunday and 13 Israeli soldiers were slain in the most intense day of fighting in Israel’s current offensive against Hamas, officials said.
Israel said it pummeled a neighborhood in east Gaza because the warren of shops and concrete-block homes was the site of frequent rocket launches and concealed a network of tunnels dug by Hamas fighters and allied militant factions.

When their troops went in, Israeli military officers say, they were surprised by the tenacity, training and weaponry of their opponents. They said Israeli soldiers were repeatedly hit by Gaza militants firing from windows, employing land mines and setting booby traps.
“It was a very hard battle there,” a senior Israeli military official said. “I have to admit that we were facing good fighters from the other side.”
The seven-hour attack by Israeli artillery and tank shells, followed by small-arms gun battles in the streets, left the district in ruins. There were bodies in the streets and gray-faced Palestinians being dug out of the rubble and stacked into ambulances. Thousands of residents had fled in the middle of the night, many barefoot.
The Gaza Health Ministry said 70 Palestinians were killed in the fighting in the Shijaiyah district on the eastern outskirts of Gaza City, the new front line. In all, more than 100 Palestinians died Sunday. Hamas health officials, in keeping with their practice, did not say whether the dead were civilians or fighters.
Sami Abu Zohri, a Hamas spokesman, called the Israeli offensive in Shijaiyah “a massacre” and “a war crime.”
More than 445 Palestinians, many of them women and children, have died in the nearly two-week-long offensive.
The Hamas military also asserted that its fighters had captured an Israeli soldier. Abu Obaida, a spokesman for the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, appeared on Hamas TV to make the claim. Minutes later, there were fireworks on the streets and shouts of “God is great!” from loudspeakers in the mosques.
An Israeli military spokesman said the army was investigating and did not confirm the abduction. “There's no kidnapped Israeli soldier and those rumors are untrue,” Ron Prosor, Israel’s U.N. ambassador, told reporters in New York.
It was the single worst day so far for Israelis. Israeli military deaths have risen to 18 since the armed forces launched a ground operation Thursday.
The State Department late Sunday confirmed the deaths of two U.S. citizens in Gaza, Max Steinberg and Sean Carmeli. “Out of respect for those affected by this, we have nothing further at this time,” spokeswoman Jen Psaki said in a statement.
In a statement early Monday, The Jewish Federations of North America said Steinberg was from Woodland Hills, Calif., and Carmeli from South Padre Island, Tex.
The Israeli death toll is now higher than during the Israeli military’s 2009 incursion into Gaza, when 13 Israelis were killed.
More than 77 soldiers have entered hospitals countrywide, some of them seriously wounded.
President Obama, in a phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “raised serious concern about the growing number of casualties,” according to the White House. Secretary of State John F. Kerry’s office announced he would fly to Cairo on Monday, seeking international help in brokering a cease-fire.
As the U.N. Security Council gathered Sunday night for an emergency meeting requested by council member Jordan, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called Israel’s Shejaiyah operation an “atrocious action,” and said that “Israel must exercise maximum restraint and do far more to protect civilians.”
Ban, who spoke in Qatar, traveled to the region Saturday on what he said was a “journey of solidarity and peace.” He plans to visit Cairo as well as Jerusalem and Ramallah, on the West Bank. He called on all sides to “respect international law.”
A Jordan-drafted council resolution expresses “grave concern” about the high number of civilians killed in Gaza, including children, and it calls for an immediate cease-fire, “including the withdrawal of Israeli occupying forces from the Gaza Strip,” the Associated Press reported.