GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip -- Turmoil from the battle between Israel and Hamas spilled over Friday into the West Bank, sparking the most widespread Palestinian protests in years as hundreds of young demonstrators in a number of towns clashed with Israeli troops, who shot and killed at least 11 people.
Israel's bombardment of the Gaza Strip continued today, when an airstrike on a house in Gaza City killed at least seven Palestinians -- the highest number of fatalities in a single hit. A furious overnight barrage of tank fire and airstrikes wreaked destruction in some towns, killed a family of six in a house and sent thousands fleeing their homes.
The Israeli military said the operation involved 160 warplanes dropping some 80 tons of explosives over the course of 40 minutes and succeeded in destroying a network of tunnels used by Hamas to elude airstrikes and surveillance.
Israel appeared determined to inflict as much damage as possible on Gaza's Hamas rulers before international efforts for a cease-fire accelerated.
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"The aim of that joint activity of air and ground forces was to deliver a severe blow to Hamas's underground tunnel system, which we refer to as the 'metro,' which is essentially a city beneath the city of Gaza," Israeli military spokesman Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus said. "It is a strategic asset that Hamas has invested many years of effort and time and significant resources to construct."
It was too soon to say how much of the tunnel system was destroyed, he said, but he added that "quite a lot of enemy combatants" were killed in the operation. Military correspondents for Israeli media outlets said the military believed dozens of militants were killed inside the tunnels.
Although ground forces participated, they did not enter the Gaza Strip, Conricus said, contradicting a statement the night before that a ground assault on the enclave was underway.
An airstrike targeted a three-story house on the edge of a refugee camp. Said Alghoul, who lives nearby, said Israeli warplanes dropped at least three bombs on the home without warning residents in advance. Rescuers called a bulldozer to dig through the rubble for survivors or bodies.
"Unlike our very elaborate efforts to clear civilian areas before we strike high-rises or large buildings inside Gaza, that wasn't feasible this time," Conricus said, adding that the operation targeted Hamas tunnels and infrastructure with "precision-guided munitions."
Shortly afterward, Hamas said it fired a salvo of rockets at southern Israel in response to the airstrike.
Abed Nofal, 35, was on the phone in his home in Gaza's Jabaliya neighborhood, which is next to farmland that he considered an unlikely target, when he saw a rocket contrail streaking his way. He had begun running to the far side of the apartment when an explosion tore through the building. In the shattering confusion, he helped his sobbing wife, who is expecting their first child, to her feet, and they ran for a shelter down the road.
"I feel like life is losing its meaning," Nofal, a driver for humanitarian groups, said in a telephone interview. "It's like every time I'm working hard to achieve something. Then in one second everything is not there."
A Hamas spokesperson, Fawzi Barhoum, told Al-Jazeera on Friday night that the group would consider negotiating a "calming" in the fighting if Israel complied with unspecified demands about "lifting its hand" from Gaza and the sites of clashes in Jerusalem.
Israeli media reports quoted anonymous Israeli security officials saying they would be open to cease-fire talks.
The conflict, which was sparked by tensions in Jerusalem over the past month, has reverberated widely. Since Monday night, Hamas has fired hundreds of rockets into Israel, which has pounded the Gaza Strip with strikes.
In Gaza, at least 126 people have been killed, including 31 children and 20 women; in Israel, seven people have been killed, including a 6-year-old boy and a soldier. The United Nations said 10,000 Gazans had left their homes to take shelter in such places as schools and mosques.
ARAB-JEWISH VIOLENCE
Israeli cities with mixed Arab and Jewish populations have seen daily violence, with mobs from each community clashing and trashing property. The violence continued in cities across the country Friday, while new clashes broke out in the occupied West Bank, which had been relatively calm in recent days.
In the West Bank, on the outskirts of Ramallah, Nablus and other towns and cities, hundreds of Palestinians protested against the Gaza campaign and Israeli actions in Jerusalem. Waving Palestinian flags, they trucked in tires that they set up in burning barricades and hurled stones at Israeli soldiers. At least 10 protesters were shot and killed by soldiers. An 11th Palestinian was killed when he tried to stab a soldier at a military position.
By sunset Friday, unrest flared in several Arab neighborhoods of east Jerusalem, where Palestinians throwing stones and firebombs battled police wielding stun grenades and tear gas, and protesters set cars and trees afire. The Israeli human-rights group B'Tselem reported that Israeli settlers had set fire to Palestinian farmland in the West Bank.
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Dozens of pro-Palestinian protesters from Lebanon broke through a border fence, crossed into Israeli territory and set a fire in an open field near the northern town of Metula. Soldiers shot at them, and they returned to Lebanese territory, according to the Israeli military. One of the demonstrators, a 21-year-old Lebanese man who was shot after rushing the border, died later from his wounds, according to Al-Manar, Hezbollah's official TV channel.
In the coastal city of Netanya, police arrested nine Jewish Israelis who were "walking around looking ... to beat people up," said police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld. In Beersheba in the south, 13 Arab residents were arrested. In the Arab city of Umm al-Fahm, police arrested 11 people who "threw petrol bombs and attacked police officers," Rosenfeld said. In Tel Aviv, two men carrying iron bars were detained, according to a police statement.
Police also arrested 43 people overnight in the central city of Lod, the scene of some of the worst communal violence and riots, for throwing gasoline bombs and rocks and attacking police officers, according to Rosenfeld. And new clashes broke out Friday in the coastal city of Acre.
About 800 people have been arrested across Israel over the past week, about 80% of them Arabs. Arab citizens of Israel have long accused the Israeli police of one-sided enforcement and not responding to incidents in their neighborhoods. In recent days, many have lodged the same complaint against border police units -- paramilitary troops who normally patrol the West Bank and neighborhoods in east Jerusalem -- that have been deployed throughout Israel to help quell the rioting. Arabs say the officers have turned out in force against Arab protesters but have been largely absent when Jewish violence occurs.
"The border police are responding to every incident that takes place on the ground," Rosenfeld said in response, including incidents where "innocent civilians are under life-threatening situations."
In a nationally televised speech, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned that the civil unrest put Israel in the position of fighting "a campaign on two fronts," one of which was Gaza. "The second front: Israel's cities," he said, repeating his vow from a day earlier to deploy the military to prevent the "anarchy" of mob violence seen in several cities this week.
"I again call on the citizens of Israel not to take the law into their own hands; whoever does so will be punished severely," he said. "We will act with full force against enemies from without and lawbreakers from within to restore calm to the state of Israel."
Netanyahu vowed that Hamas would "pay a very heavy price" for its rocket attacks. Israel called up 9,000 reservists Thursday to join its troops massed at the Gaza border.
Hamas urged Palestinians in the West Bank to "set the ground ablaze under the feet of the occupation."
"O you free heroes of the West Bank, blessed are your arms," a spokesperson for Hamas' armed wing said. "We salute your revolution."
CEASE-FIRE EFFORTS
Many nations have called for a peaceful resolution to the conflict. U.S., Egyptian and Qatari officials have been trying to broker a cease-fire, with the United States deputy assistant secretary of state for Israel and Palestinian affairs, Hady Amr, landing Friday in Tel Aviv.
The United States and other Western countries insisted that the rocket attacks from Gaza must stop and refrained from placing blame on Israel.
"Palestinians -- including in Gaza -- and Israelis equally deserve to live in dignity, safety and security," President Joe Biden said in a statement marking Eid al-Fitr, the Muslim holiday that concludes the holy month of Ramadan. "No family should have to fear for their safety within their own home or place of worship."
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres also called for calm by citing the holiday.
"Out of respect for the spirit of Eid, I appeal for an immediate de-escalation and cessation of hostilities in Gaza and Israel," he tweeted. "Too many innocent civilians have already died. This conflict can only increase radicalization and extremism in the whole region."
The current conflict was triggered after clashes earlier this month in Jerusalem among Palestinians, Israeli police and right-wing Jews. Tensions have been running high, in part, because of efforts by Israeli settlers to evict several Palestinian families from their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of east Jerusalem.
Those tensions boiled over on Monday, when clashes between Israeli police and Arab protesters near Jerusalem's al-Aqsa Mosque left more than 300 Palestinians injured.
The Biden administration notified Congress on Thursday that it will provide $10 million to Palestinian groups in the West Bank and Gaza to support exchange and reconciliation projects with Israelis. The recipients of the aid were not named.
The State Department said Friday that the money is part of more than $100 million that the administration allocated to the Palestinians earlier this year, reversing a near total cutoff in support under former President Donald Trump.
In a notice to lawmakers obtained by The Associated Press, the U.S. Agency for International Development said the $10 million would go to support "people-to-people efforts to bring together conflict-affected groups to address divisions that may be rooted in group differences such as ethnicity, religion, status, class, or political affiliation in areas affected by conflict and civil war."
It said the money would be spent mainly on cross-border projects between Israel and the West Bank and Gaza, but also might include programs for Jews and Arabs living in Israel.
Information for this article was contributed by Fares Akram and Lee Keath, Matthew Lee and Isabel DeBre of The Associated Press; by Steve Hendrix, Michael E. Miller, Shira Rubin, Hazem Balousha, Miriam Berger and Suzan Haidamous of The Washington Post (WPNS); and by Vivian Yee of The New York Times.
