Carnage at U.N. school as Israel pounds Gaza refugee camp

GAZA/JERUSALEM, July 30 (Reuters) - Israeli shelling killed at least 15 Palestinians sheltering in a school in Gaza's biggest refugee camp on Wednesday, the Health Ministry said, as Egyptian mediators prepared a revised proposal to try to halt more than three weeks of fighting.

Some 3,300 Palestinians, including many women and children, were taking refuge in the building in Jabalya refugee camp when it came under fire around dawn, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) said.

Israeli artillery that hit our school," UNRWA chief Pierre Krahenbuhl said in a statement after representatives of the agency visited the scene and examined fragments, craters and other damage.

Blood splattered floors and mattresses inside classrooms at the Jabalya Girls Elementary School and survivors picked through shattered glass and debris for flesh and body parts to bury.

"I call on the international community to take deliberate international political action to put an immediate end to the continuing carnage," Krahenbuhl said.

The Gaza Health Ministry put the number of dead in the attack at 15 after a local UNRWA official said 19 had been killed. Krahenbujl, however, said it was premature to give an official death toll.

"But we know that there were multiple civilian deaths and injuries, including of women and children and the UNRWA guard, who was trying to protect the site," Krahenbujl said.

An Israeli military spokeswoman said militants had fired mortar bombs from the vicinity of the school and troops shot back in response. The incident was still being reviewed.

The army said it would hold fire unilaterally in limited areas of the Gaza Strip where soldiers were not operating for four hours from 3 p.m. (1200 GMT) as a "temporary humanitarian window". It was not clear whether that included Jabalya.

Sami Abu Zuhri, a spokesman for the Hamas Islamist movement which controls Gaza, dismissed the partial, temporary ceasefire as a "media stunt", saying it would not allow rescue workers to retrieve casualties in combat zones Israel had excluded.

Israel has been shelling in Jebalya, where some 120,000 people live, since Tuesday, in what the chief Israeli military spokesman, Brigadier-General Motti Almoz, described as a slight broadening of its campaign against militants in the Hamas Islamist-dominated Gaza Strip.

UNRWA said on Tuesday it had found a cache of rockets concealed at another Gaza school - the third such discovery since the conflict began. It condemned unnamed groups for putting civilians at risk.

Krahenbuhl said the Jabalya school's precise location and the fact that it was housing thousands of displaced people had been communicated to the Israeli military 17 times, with the last notification just hours before the fatal shelling.

BLOCKADE

Israeli tank fire also struck the main market in Jabalya on Wednesday, killing at least three people and wounding 40 others, the health ministry said. Seven members of one family died in an Israeli attack in Deir al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip.

The ministry said 1,287 Palestinians, mostly civilians, have been killed since Israel began its offensive on July 8 with the declared aim of halting cross-border rocket fire.