Israeli troops and Hamas fighters traded fierce gunfire on the streets of Gaza City on Tuesday as Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas accused the Jewish state of trying to "wipe out" his people.
Israeli special forces backed by tanks and air strikes barrelled their way ever deeper into Gaza's largest city, advancing several hundred metres (yards) into several neighbourhoods in the south, witnesses and correspondents said.
The thud of tanks shells and the rattle of gunfire kept terrified residents awake on Monday night, although many had fled the area. Witnesses said the fighting was the most intense of the 18-day-old conflict.
As Egypt pressed on with an initiative designed to bring about an immediate end to Israel's deadliest ever offensive in the impoverished Gaza Strip, Abbas said the Jewish state appeared intent on waging a war of extermination.
"This is the 18th day of the Israeli aggression against our people, which is become more ferocious each day as the number of victims rises," Abbas said. "Israel is keeping up this aggression to wipe out our people over there."
In an apparent allusion to the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the leader of an ultra-nationalist opposition party said Israel should follow the example set by the US when it brought Japan to its knees in World War II.
"We must continue to fight Hamas just like the United States did with the Japanese in World War II," Yisrael Beitenu leader Avigdor Lieberman said in a speech in Tel Aviv, according to the website of the Jerusalem Post newspaper.
Israel's military chief said Operation Cast Lead was making progress but warned troops faced "complicated" conditions in Gaza City, home to more than half a million Palestinians where Israel has little combat experience.
"We have already achieved a lot against both Hamas's infrastructure and its military wing but we still have work to be done," the chief of staff, Gabi Ashkenazi, told lawmakers.
Around 30 people were killed in the latest clashes, bringing the overall toll from the conflict on the Palestinian side to at least 950, including some 280 children, according to emergency services in Gaza.
On the Israeli side, 10 soldiers and three civilians have been killed in combat or by rocket attacks since December 27 when the Jewish state began its offensive.
Asked if the war's aims had now been achieved, Defence Minister Ehud Barak told reporters: "Most of them, probably not all of them."
A Hamas delegation is currently in Cairo for talks on a Western-backed proposal drawn up by President Hosni Mubarak on how to end the fighting.
A senior official in Cairo indicated Egypt was getting increasingly frustrated at Hamas's response so far to its initiative.
"We're working seriously with Hamas, we need to end the vagueness and they need to say 'yes', now, to our plan," the Egyptian diplomat told AFP on condition of anonymity.
Senior Hamas leader Mussa Abu Marzuk acknowledged the movement had "substantial observations" on the initiative but said there was "still a chance" that the Islamists would accept the plan.
"If the initiative is accepted, it will be in accordance with the position set out by Hamas at the start, namely an Israeli withdrawal, a ceasefire and the opening of the crossing points" between Gaza and Israel, Abu Marzuk said.
Hillary Clinton, due to take over as US secretary of state in a week's time, said president-elect Barack Obama's administration would make "every effort" to forge Israeli-Palestinian peace.
"The president-elect and I understand and are deeply sympathetic to Israel's desire to defend itself under the current conditions, and to be free of shelling by Hamas rockets," she told her Senate confirmation hearing.
"However, we have also been reminded of the tragic humanitarian costs of conflict in the Middle East and pained by the suffering of Palestinian and Israeli civilians."
UN chief Ban Ki-moon, who was headed to the Middle East on Tuesday, also called on Israel and Hamas to immediately stop the fighting, saying "too many people have died."
Aid agencies have warned of a growing humanitarian crisis in the territory where the vast majority of the 1.5 million population depends on foreign aid and that is already reeling from months of a punishing Israeli blockade.
The charity Save the Children estimated only an eighth of the life-saving supplies of food and medicines needed by Gaza's population have crossed into the territory since December 27.
"More than a million people in Gaza rely on aid coming in by truck, but so far the amount coming in is nowhere near what is needed," said the charity's spokesman Benedict Dempsey.
"The amount of aid that has crossed into Gaza so far is pitiful."
