GAZA CITY, Palestinian Territories, July 10 AFP – Israeli air strikes on the Gaza Strip have killed 14 people, medics say, on the third day of a widening military campaign, as the UN Security Council prepared to hold an emergency meeting.

The first strike hit a coffee shop in the city of Khan Yunis, emergency services spokesman Ashraf al-Qudra said, adding that six men were killed and at least 15 other people wounded.

The second, in Nusseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, on the home of Raed Shalat, killed him and wounded several others, Qudra said.

Further strikes on two houses in Khan Yunis killed seven people – three women and four children, he said.

Dozens of strikes were heard slamming into the besieged Palestinian territory in the early hours of Thursday, as Israel’s Operation Protective Edge, the largest military campaign against Gaza since 2012, entered day three.

On Wednesday, 29 Palestinians were killed, and Tuesday’s toll stood at 21, bringing the total number of dead to 64, but Hamas kept up its rocket fire into Israel and sent thousands running to shelters across the country.

The dead include at least 10 women and 18 children, according to an AFP count based on medical reports.

The overall toll included six militants killed in raids into Israel on Wednesday and Tuesday.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas accused Israel of committing “genocide” in Gaza, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned of even tougher action to come.

There have been no Israeli deaths so far, but Hamas showed its firepower as it launched waves of rockets across Israel that triggered sirens in cities as far from Gaza as Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa.

There were no confirmed hits in the northern port city itself, but media reports spoke of rockets hitting either open ground or the sea in the surrounding region.

Tanks were seen massed on the Gaza border as Netanyahu came under mounting pressure from hardliners within his governing coalition to put boots back on the ground in the territory from which Israel pulled all troops and settlers in 2005.

“We have decided to further intensify the attacks on Hamas and the terror organisations in Gaza,” his office quoted him as saying.

President Shimon Peres warned that, “if the fire continues we do not rule out a ground incursion”, his office quoted him as saying in an interview with CNN.

This “may happen quite soon”, said Peres, who retires later this month.

The United Nations Security Council will hold an emergency meeting on the crisis from 10.00am (2400 AEST) on Thursday, with Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon due to give the latest about the situation on the ground, followed by closed-door consultations between the council’s 15 member states.

The meeting follows a request by Arab envoys.

The European Union and the US both called for restraint in the confrontation.

Netanyahu and US Secretary of State John Kerry spoke by phone on Wednesday.

Kerry plans to speak with Abbas “over the next 24 hours”, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said.

The Palestinian teenager was murdered in apparent revenge for the kidnap on June 12 of three Israeli youths in the occupied West Bank, who were subsequently killed.

Their abductions sparked a huge Israeli assault on Hamas’s infrastructure in the territory and retaliatory rocket fire from the Islamists’ Gaza power base.

Three of the six Israelis held over the young Palestinian’s abduction and killing last week are to be released on Thursday, Israeli media said, raising the spectre of renewed unrest by outraged Palestinians.

The three expected to be let out of custody deny involvement in the murder, while the remaining three are said by authorities to have confessed.

Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal demanded world pressure on Israel to end its campaign.

“If the world wants an end to the bloodshed it must put pressure on Netanyahu and his criminal gang to stop aggression against Gaza,” Meshaal said in a televised speech from his base in Doha.

Early on Thursday the Israeli military said that during the course of the preceding day, “at least 82 rockets hit Israel” and 21 were intercepted.