ISRAELI air raids on the Gaza Strip have killed at least 28 Palestinians since the bombing began on Monday night, health officials said today.

At least 107 people have been injured by the bombing and nine children and two women are among the dead, Gaza’s health ministry confirmed.

French news agency AFP reported that 90 per cent of the estimated 200 rockets fired towards Israel by armed Palestinian groups have been intercepted. 

However, two women in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon were killed by the rockets and at least 10 others were injured, the Israeli military said.

Charity Save the Children condemned the indiscriminate targeting and killing of civilians and demanded an immediate stop to the violence.

“There is no possible justification for children being killed or injured,” it said.

“Children are already living in grave danger, and with every rocket or air strike launched they are brutally reminded of this fact.

“We urgently need all parties to stop hostilities and bring an end to the fear and suffering children and families have endured for far too long. How many children have to die before the situation is brought to an end?”

The United Nations called for a “redoubling of efforts to calm down the situation,” for Israel to ensure that its air strikes are “directed solely at military objectives” and for armed Palestinian groups to end their use of “indiscriminate weapons, such as the rockets being fired into Israel.”

Meanwhile the Israeli military began mobilising 5,000 troops near the Gaza border.

The current violence and retaliations stem from weeks of tensions in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian city of East Jerusalem as right-wing Israeli groups geared up to celebrate the anniversary of the military occupation of the city in 1967.

On Monday, Israeli police fired tear gas, stun grenades and rubber-coated bullets at Palestinian worshippers at al-Aqsa Mosque, one of Islam’s holiest sites, as they continued to mark the final nights of Ramadan.

The UN also called on Israel to immediately halt its threat to evict hundreds of Palestinian households from their legally protected homes in East Jerusalem, blaming Israeli settler organisations “whose stated aim is to turn Palestinian neighbourhoods into Jewish neighbourhoods.”

“This demographic engineering has been abetted by the Jerusalem municipality, whose urban master plans have explicitly set a goal of limiting the city’s Palestinian population at 30 per cent,” it said.

“Establishing official population targets such as this reinforces entrenched patterns of ethnic domination, which have no place in the modern world.”