Apocalypse Now: Israel bombards Gaza for fifth straight day with nearly 1,000 airstrikes paving the way for imminent invasion

• Thousands of soldiers and hundreds of tanks and armoured vehicles are at muster points along the border
• Hamas prime minister's headquarters, police compound and huge network of smuggling tunnels were targeted
  
• Follows Hamas rocket strike aimed at Jerusalem
• Israeli military have targeted more than 800 sites since the operation began
  
• Egypt's president will today hold four-way talks with the Qatari emir, the prime minister of Turkey and Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal in Cairo to discuss to Gaza crisis
• Palestinian militants in Gaza fired four rockets at the Israeli port city of Ashdod while Israel used an Iron Dome missile interceptor battery in Tel Aviv after it again came under rocket fire from Gaza
• Israel says its Iron Dome system has intercepted nearly 250 rockets since Wednesday
• Yesterday, the White House defended Israel's right to defend itself and decide how to respond to the rocket fire
• David Cameron urged Israel to 'do everything possible' to end the crisis
• Shadow foreign secretary Douglas Alexander appealed to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to go to the region for last ditch talks to avert full-scale conflict

By Leon Watson

PUBLISHED:05:44 EST, 17 November 2012| UPDATED:21:04 EST, 17 November 2012

Israeli warplanes have struck Gaza militants for a fifth straight day as its military prepared for a possible ground invasion, though Egypt saw 'some indications' of a truce ahead.

Forty-seven Palestinians, about half of them civilians, including 12 children, have been killed in Israel's raids, Palestinian officials said. More than 500 rockets fired from Gaza have hit Israel, killing three people and injuring dozens.

Israel unleashed its massive air campaign on Wednesday, killing a leading militant of the Hamas Islamist group that controls Gaza and rejects Israel's existence, with the declared goal of deterring gunmen in the coastal enclave from launching rockets that have plagued its southern communities for years.

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Fierce clashes between Israeli forces and Gaza militants are continuing for the fourth day

A government compound was also hit while devout Muslims streamed to the area for early morning prayers, although it did not report any casualties from that attack

Smoke rises during an explosion from an Israeli forces strike in Gaza City today

The Jewish state has since launched more than 950 air strikes on the coastal Palestinian territory, targeting weaponry and flattening militant homes and headquarters.

The raids continued past midnight on Sunday. One targeted a building in Gaza City housing the offices of local Arab media, wounding three journalists from al Quds television, a station Israel sees as pro-Hamas, witnesses said.

Two other predawn attacks on houses in the Jebalya refugee camp killed one child and wounded 12 other people, medical officials said.

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These attacks followed a defiant statement by Hamas military spokesman Abu Ubaida, who told a televised news conference.

'This round of confrontation will not be the last against the Zionist enemy and it is only the beginning.'

The masked gunman dressed in military fatigues insisted that despite Israel's blows Hamas 'is still strong enough to destroy the enemy.'

An Israeli attack on Saturday destroyed the house of a Hamas commander near the Egyptian border.

Missiles knocked out five electricity transformers, plunging more than 400,000 people in southern Gaza into darkness, according to the Gaza electricity distribution company

Palestinians inspect the damage at the office building of Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh after being destroyed during an Israeli airstrike in Gaza

A rocket is launched from Gaza as seen from near Sderot. Today it was reported militants deployed an Iron Dome rocket defence battery in central Israel

Casualties there were averted however, because Israel had fired non-exploding missiles at the building beforehand from a drone, which the militant's family understood as a warning to flee, and thus their lives were spared, witnesses said.

Israeli aircraft also bombed Hamas government buildings in Gaza on Saturday, including the offices of Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh and a police headquarters.

Among those killed in air strikes on Gaza on Saturday were at least four suspected militants riding motorcycles, and several civilians including a 30-year-old woman.

It came as thousands of soldiers and hundreds of tanks and armoured vehicles were at muster points along the border, as speculation mounted that Israel was to launch a ground offensive.

Tonight, David Cameron urged Israel to 'do everything possible' to end the crisis. In a phone call with Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu, he expressed sympathy for the continued 'unacceptable' rocket attacks.

A Downing Street spokeswoman said: 'The Prime Minister expressed his sympathy for the unacceptable rocket attacks that Israel continued to suffer. He also expressed concern over the risk of the conflict escalating further and the danger of further civilian casualties on both sides.

Iron Dome: Israeli soldiers watch as an Iron Dome launcher fires an interceptor rocket near the southern city of Beersheba today

A Palestinian youth takes cover behind a makeshift barrier (right) during clashes with Israeli soldiers at the Qalandia checkpoint, in the occupied West Bank

Israeli soldiers fire tear gas towards strone throwers demonstrating against the Israeli military offensive on the Gaza Strip in the village of Beit Omar, north of the West Bank town of Hebron

'The Prime Minister said that the UK was putting pressure on both sides to de-escalate and urged Prime Minister Netanyahu to do everything possible to bring the conflict to an end.'

It came after protesters gathered near the Israeli embassy in London to condemned the British Government's stance on the conflict.

Speakers took to a podium to condemn the Government after Foreign Secretary William Hague said the Hamas regime in Gaza bore 'principal responsibility' for the escalation of violence.

Israel had been slowly expanding its operation beyond military targets but before dawn it ramped that up dramatically, hitting Hamas symbols of power. A three-storey apartment building belonging to a Hamas military commander was hit, and ambulances ferried more than 30 inhabitants wounded by the powerful explosion.

Missiles smashed into two small security facilities as well as the massive Hamas police headquarters in Gaza City, setting off a huge blaze that engulfed nearby houses and civilian cars parked outside, the Interior Ministry reported. No one was inside the buildings.

The Interior Ministry said a government compound was also hit while devout Muslims streamed to the area for early morning prayers, although it did not report any casualties from that attack.

Also hit was a cabinet building where the Hamas prime minister has his offices. Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh was not inside.

Missiles knocked out five electricity transformers, plunging more than 400,000 people in southern Gaza into darkness, according to the Gaza electricity distribution company.

Israeli firemen douse a burning car after a rocket fired by Palestinian militants from the Gaza Strip landed in the southern Israeli city of Ashdod today

A student from the University of Birzeit is carried away injured during clashes with Israeli soldiers in the occupied West Bank town of Betunia

Unexploded bomb: A Palestinian Hamas policeman looks at an Israeli rocket in the street in Gaza City on Saturday

In southern Gaza, Israeli aircraft went after the hundreds of underground tunnels militants used to smuggle in weapons and other contraband from Egypt, residents reported. A huge explosion in the area sent buildings shuddering in the Egyptian city of El-Arish, 30 miles away.

The tunnels have also been a lifeline for residents of the area during the recent fighting, providing a conduit for food, fuel and other goods after supplies stopped coming in from Israel before the military operation began.

Israeli aircraft kept pounding their original targets, the militants' weapons storage facilities and underground rocket launching sites. They also went after rocket squads more aggressively.

Israel has put 75,000 reservists on standby amid speculation of an impending ground invasion

Tunisian Foreign Minister Rafik Abdessalem, center, visits Gaza's Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh's demolished headquarters in Gaza today

Palestinians carry the body of Ali Al-Mana'ama, a Hamas militant in Maghazi Refugee Camp in the central Gaza Strip. A group of Hamas militants were killed in an Israeli air strike east of Maghazi Refugee Camp earlier today

Palestinians carry the body of Hamas militant Ali Al-Mana'ama during his funeral in Maghazi Refugee Camp

A Palestinian youth gestures at Israeli soldiers during clashes in the Jalama checkpoint in the West Bank near Jenin city

Relatives look at the bodies of Ali Al Mana'ama, top, Ali Darwesh, centre, and Ahmad Abdujawad, Hamas militants, at the morgue of Al-Aqsa hospital in Deir Al Balah, central Gaza Strip

The military has called up thousands of reservists and massed troops, tanks and other armoured vehicles along the border with Gaza, signalling a ground invasion could be imminent.

Palestinian militants, undaunted by the heavy damage the Israeli attacks have inflicted, have unleashed some 500 rockets against the Jewish state, including new, longer-range weapons turned for the first time this week against Jerusalem and the Tel Aviv heartland.

Following those attacks, the military deployed an Iron Dome rocket defence battery in central Israel today. The system, devised precisely to deflect the Gaza rocket threat, was deployed two months earlier than planned, the Defence Ministry said.

According to Israel its Iron Dome system has intercepted nearly 250 rockets since a round of fighting broke out on Wednesday, including an incoming projectile bound for Tel Aviv.

An Israeli Merkava tank is seen in a staging area on the border with the Gaza Strip

Israeli children wave their national flag as they greet an army convoy passing on a road leading to the Israel-Gaza border near the southern Israeli town of Ofakim

Welp, looks like all of Ishmael is slowly but surely gaining up on Israel

BREAKING: As Egypt Sides With Hamas, Rockets Launched From Sinai Crash Into Israel

The Morsi government has overseen a dramatic deterioration in the security situation in the Sinai Peninsula. Salafist terrorists have launched a series of spectacular attacks on Egyptian security officers and Israelis in recent months. Analysts have called particular attention to the role of educated middle class Egyptian terrorists in the attacks, which some had sought to link to local Beduin.

Israeli officials have repeatedly called upon Cairo to "reassert its sovereignty" in the increasingly lawless region, with the Egyptians proving either unable or unwilling to do so.

The rocket attack comes at a time when the Muslim Brotherhood-linked Egyptian government of President Mohamed Morsi has been providing "aggressive support" to Hamas in the Iranian-backed terror group's conflict with Israel. Egyptian Prime Minister Hesham Kandil visited the Gaza Strip earlier today, one of a series of moves which have distanced Egypt from the United States and its allies, who seek to isolate Hamas over the group's commitment to destroying the Jewish State and its tactics of raining down rockets on Israeli civilians.

Meanwhile Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh led Gaza crowds in chants of "Long Live Egypt" today in appreciation of the new closeness between Cairo and Hamas.