An Israeli ground operation against the beleaguered Gaza Strip seemed imminent on Thursday as forces moved toward the border area according to the Associated Press. Trucks were seen moving tanks and armored personnel carriers according to the report which buses carrying soldiers also arrived. On the social media site Twitter, several Israeli soldiers posted pictures of themselves geared up and for what could be yet another ground invasion of the occupied territory. 

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said that reservists had been called up for possible action and that the army was prepared to draft as many as 30,000 troops for a ground operation.  

Five Palestinians were killed by Israeli air strikes on Thursday morning, as around 250 rockets were fired into Israel, killing three Israelis according to Al Jazeera. 

The latest violence raised the total number of Gazans killed in 20 hours of Israeli air strikes to 13. At least 120 other residents of the coastal enclave have been injured, according to medics.

In the same period, Gaza rockets killed three Israelis and injured another five in a direct hit on a residential building in the southern town of Kiryat Malahi, said Israeli police.

“We have three killed,” spokeswoman Luba Samri told the AFP news agency, saying four other people were also injured in a “direct hit on a house” in the town, 18 miles north of the Gaza Strip.

The fighting began when Israel assassinated Ahmed al-Jabari, head of Hamas’ military wing, with an air strike on his car in Gaza on Wednesday. Jabari’s bodyguard and son were also killed in the strike.

Thursday’s rocket fire on Kiryat Malahi was claimed by Jabari’s group, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, in a statement on its website.

Tension is rising across the Middle East as Israel and Hamas, the Palestinian group which controls the Gaza Strip, continue to exchange fire amid the worst outbreak of violence since the Israeli assault on the territory nearly four years ago.

Three Israelis died in the northern town of Kiryat Malachi on Thursday after a rocket fired from Gaza hit an apartment building.

Israeli sources said two rockets hit Tel Aviv – one landed in the sea while another missile landed in an uninhabited area of Israel’s commercial center.

Air raid sirens sent residents running for shelter in Tel Aviv, a Mediterranean city that has not been hit by a rocket since the 1991 Gulf War.

Smoke rises following Israeli air strikes in Gaza City November 14, 2012. An Israeli official said on Wednesday the assassination of Hamas’s top commander in the Gaza Strip was not the end of Israel’s attack on the coastal territory and more strikes would follow. Ahmed Al-Jaabari, Hamas’s military chief, was killed when his car was hit by an Israeli airstrike. Multiple other Israeli attacks rocked the Gaza Strip.

Islamic Jihad, another Gaza-based Palestinian group, said that it had fired one of the rockets that hit Tel Aviv. Late on Thursday, Israel began moving troops towards the Gaza Strip and Ehud Barak, the Israeli defense minister, authorized the call-up of 30,000 reservists for a possible ground invasion.

At least a dozen lorries carrying tanks and armored vehicles were seen moving towards the border area, while buses ferried soldiers.

While southern Israeli areas near Gaza have long coped with rocket fire, the attacks on the Tel Aviv area illustrated the significant capabilities that Hamas has developed.

Palestinian fighters had previously hit Rishon Lezion before but never reached Tel Aviv, roughly 43 miles north of the Gaza Strip.

‘Savage aggression’

At least 19 Palestinians, including two children, have been killed and more than 150 others wounded as of Thursday in fighting which began with an aerial attack that killed Ahmad Jabari, Hamas military commander who was accused by Israel for overseeing attacks against civilians.

“It is important to understand one simple point: there is no moral symmetry between the terrorists in Gaza and Israel,” Binyamin Netanyahu, Israeli prime minister, said on Thursday

“They are committing double war crimes: they fire at Israeli civilians and hide behind Palestinian civilians.”

Netanyahu referred to the Israeli attacks on Gaza as “surgical.”

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez called Israel’s bombing campaign against the Gaza Strip an act of savagery against the Palestinians.

“Another savage aggression against the Gaza Strip has begun,” Chavez told a cabinet meeting on Thursday televised by state-run TV.

Rockets and mortars

On the second day of an assault that Israel said might last many days, its fighter jets bombed targets in and around Gaza City late into the night.

Israeli authorities said more than 250 rockets and mortars were fired by Hamas and other armed groups from Gaza as of Thursday afternoon, and that its Iron Dome interceptor missile system had shot down dozens of the projectiles.

On either side of the frontier, people fled streets for cover.

Israeli Channel 2 TV showed panicked Tel Aviv residents running for cover and lying down on the ground after the air-raid sirens began sounding.

The armed wing of the Islamic Jihad announced on Thursday it had fired an Iranian-built rocket at Tel Aviv.

“The Quds Brigades hit the occupied city of Tel Rabea (Tel Aviv) with a Fajr 5 rocket causing a large explosion to shake the city,” the group said in a brief statement, shortly after an AFP correspondent reported seeing a rocket land in the water south of the sprawling coastal city.

“What comes next will be greater.”

In a separate statement, posted on Islamic Jihad’s website, Abu Ahmed, Islamic Jihad spokesperson, pledged that Israel would experience “further surprises so long as the aggression against the Palestinian people continues.

“The enemy began the battle but the resistance will determine how the battle will end,” he said.

Egyptian delegation

The sudden conflict pours oil on the fire of a Middle East already tense with two years of revolution and an out-of-control civil war in Syria.

Egypt recalled its ambassador to Israel on Wednesday, summoned the Israeli ambassador to Cairo in protest over the assault and ordered its representative at the UN to call for an emergency Security Council meeting.

Mohamed Morsi, the Egyptian president, spoke to US President Barack Obama and Ban Ki-moon, UN secretary-general, over phone and discussed the Gaza escalation with them.

Taher Nuno, Hamas government spokesperson, said that Egypt would send a delegation headed by Hesham Kandil, Egyptian prime minister, to Gaza on Friday.

Thursday’s deadly rocket fire on Kiryat Malahi was claimed by Jabari’s group, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, in a statement on its website.

Jabari’s funeral took place in Gaza on Thursday.

U.S. condemns Hamas, supports Israel’s right to defend itself

Israel warned Hamas that all its men were in its sights and faced censure from influential Arab countries – with the Arab League announcing it was to hold an emergency meeting on Saturday and Egypt recalling its ambassador to Israel.

Mark Regev, spokesperson for Netanyahu’s office, told Al Jazeera that Israel will “continue to hit the Hamas military machine, to hit their command and control, to hit their arsenal where they store their weapons”.

“Unfortunately today the Israeli population of southern Israel is on the receiving end of these barrages,” he said.

“We have had three people killed. Children, instead of going to school, are stuck in bomb shelters.

“They must understand that they cannot hit Israeli civilians with impunity.”

The U.S. condemned Hamas, long shunned by the West as an obstacle to peace. “There is no justification for the violence that Hamas and other terrorist organizations are employing against the people of Israel,” Mark Toner, deputy state department spokesman, said.

The UN Security Council held an emergency meeting late on Wednesday, but took no action.

In France, Laurent Fabius, foreign minister, said: “It would be a catastrophe if there is an escalation in the region.

“Israel has the right to security but it won’t achieve it through violence. The Palestinians also have the right to a state.”

The Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades issued a communique on Wednesday saying Israel had “opened the gates of hell on itself,” while Fawzi Barhum, Hamas spokesman, said Jabari’s killing was tantamount to a “declaration of war.” 

                 -TAAN, Al Jazeera, Common Dreams