JERUSALEM: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday instructed the military to begin a ground offensive in Gaza, an official statement from his office said.

Reuters witnesses and Gaza residents reported heavy artillery and naval shelling and helicopter fire along the Gaza border.

“The prime minister and defence minister have instructed the IDF (Israel Defence Force) to begin a ground operation tonight in order to hit the terror tunnels from Gaza into Israel,” the statement said.

Erdogan accuses Israel of seeking 'systematic genocide' in Gaza

Palestinian health officials say 233 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli air and naval strikes. The Israeli military claims Gaza militants have fired more than 1,300 rockets into Israel. One Israeli civilian has been killed by fire from Gaza.

A statement from the Israeli military said the operation will include “infantry, armoured corps, engineer corps, artillery and intelligence combined with aerial and naval support”.

On Thursday night, loud thuds and flashes of orange light lit the sky in the eastern Gaza strip as Israeli gunboats fired shells and tracer fire, while artillery and helicopters fired over the border, Reuters witnesses on both sides of the border said.

Gaza residents and medical officials reported heavy shelling along the eastern borders from the southern town of Rafah up to the north of the enclave.

Shells landed by the al-Wafa rehabilitation hospital east of Shejaia, an eastern suburb of Gaza. “We were not able to evacuate all the patients, the staff can barely evacuate themselves at this point. It's a desperate situation,” Basman Alashi, head of the hospital, told Reuters. “The hospital has been hit many times,” he said.

Sirens had sounded in southern Israel earlier in the day at the end of the ceasefire requested by the United Nations, giving way to renewed Palestinian rocket salvoes and Israeli bombing.

UN chief urges Israel to spare civilians

Meanwhile, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged Israel to “do far more” to spare Palestinian civilians.

“I regret that despite my repeated urgings, and those of many regional and world leaders together, an already dangerous conflict has now escalated even further,” Ban told reporters.

The UN chief described as “appalling” the death of four boys killed by Israeli strikes Wednesday on a Gaza City beach.

“I urge Israel to do far more to stop civilian casualties. There can be no military solution to this conflict,” he said.

Ceasefire efforts

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius will visit Egypt, Jordan and Israel from Friday to Sunday in a bid to help defuse the situation, and will discuss putting a European mission on the Gaza-Israel border, a diplomatic source said on Thursday.

The French diplomat said the mission could be similar to an EU mission launched in 2005 providing border help at the crossing in Rafah between Gaza and Egypt. That mission was suspended when Hamas was elected in 2007.

Fabius will meet Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and US Secretary of State John Kerry separately in Cairo, Egypt's President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi and then the Jordanian foreign minister and head of the royal court. He will meet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Tel Aviv on Sunday, the source said.

US President Barack Obama said, on Wednesday, he supported Egyptian efforts to agree a ceasefire that would end the worst flare-up of Israeli-Palestinian hostilities in two years. US officials would use their diplomatic resources over the next 24 hours to pursue closing a deal, he said.

Egypt had proposed a permanent ceasefire plan on Tuesday which Israel accepted. But Hamas, saying its terms had been ignored, rejected it.

Hamas wants Israel and Egypt, whose military-backed government is at odds with the group, to lift border restrictions that have deepened economic hardship among Gaza's 1.8million populace and caused a cash crunch in the movement, which has been unable to pay its employees for months.

The conflict was largely triggered by the killing of three Israeli teens in the occupied West Bank last month and the death on July 2 of a Palestinian youth in a suspected revenge murder.

Israel indicted on Thursday three Israelis suspected of having killed the 16-year-old Palestinian in Jerusalem. A lawyer for a legal aide group representing the adult and two minors said they would enter a plea at a later date.