GAZA CITY: Israeli strikes on Gaza killed 10 Palestinians and destroyed the Hamas government headquarters yesterday as Israel called up thousands more reservists for a possible ground war.

After Palestinian militants fired rockets at the heart of Israel on Friday, around 180 air strikes were carried out overnight, Israeli television reported.

Palestinian medics said 40 Gazans have been killed and 345 wounded since Israel launched the aerial campaign on the Palestinian enclave.

Since the start of its operation, the Israeli army says militants have fired more than 600 rockets over the border, of which 404 hit and 230 were intercepted by the Iron Dome defense system.

Yesterday, four Israeli soldiers and five civilians were hurt in separate rocket attacks on the south, which hit a building and a car, police and the army said.

The military said it had sealed off all main roads around Gaza and declared a closed military zone, in the latest sign it was poised to launch a first ground offensive on the Palestinian territory since December 2008-January 2009.

The Gaza government said four strikes “completely destroyed” its headquarters and that neighboring houses were damaged.

Air strikes on Rafah in southern Gaza killed five people and three people died in an Israeli raid on a refugee camp in central Gaza, medics said. Another man died of injuries sustained in a morning strike on Gaza City.

The world must stop Israel’s “blatant aggression” in Gaza, Tunisia’s foreign minister said in Gaza City yesterday.

Rafik Abdessalem, the second top-level diplomat to travel to Gaza in as many days, made the remarks as Hamas was locked in an escalating confrontation with the Israeli military.

“Our message to the international community is that this blatant Israeli aggression on our people in Gaza must stop,” he told AFP as he visited the ruins of the Hamas government headquarters.

His trip came a day after Egypt’s Prime Minister Hisham Qandil paid a solidarity visit to Gaza and had his photograph taken in front of the government building with his Hamas counterpart, Ismail Haniyeh.

As the Tunisian minister examined the devastation, another loud explosion could be heard nearby, an AFP correspondent said.

“This aggression is no longer acceptable or legal by any standards,” he said, calling on the Arab League to act to halt the aggression.

Abdessalem arrived in Gaza just before 0800 GMT, crossing through the Rafah border crossing with Egypt. He also denounced Israel’s aerial bombardment as “a barbaric aggression” as well as the “international silence that encourages such injustice.” Tunisia’s ruling Ennahda party and others are demanding the “criminalization of normalized relations” with Israel be written into the country’s new constitution.

Tunis had had close links with the Palestinians for years, hosting the Palestine Liberation Organization between 1982 and 1994 after it was expelled from Lebanon.

Meanwhile, Iran’s Defense Minister Ahmad Vahidi said yesterday that Islamic countries must close ranks and respond to Israel’s deadly attacks on the Gaza Strip, “Putting an end to the Zionist (Israeli) regime’s crimes is only possible through a united, revolutionary retaliation by the Muslim world,” Vahidi said in remarks carried by the official IRNA news agency.

Israel is “massacring the oppressed Palestinian people, including women and children” and its strikes amount to a “clear example of war crimes,” he charged.

Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi has announced his readiness to visit Gaza.

And speaking to exiled Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal on the telephone, Salehi said Iran was ready to send “medical and medicinal aids” to Gaza, the official IRNA news agency reported.

Yesterday, media reports said Iran was preparing to dispatch a parliamentary delegation to the Palestinian territory.

The foreign ministry is “talking with Egyptian officials to facilitate the visit through Rafah,” a terminal at Gaza’s southwestern border with Egypt, according to MP Mansour Haqiqatpour.

Jordan’s King Abdallah yesterday ordered the dispatch of urgent humanitarian aid to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, targeted by Israeli air strikes for a fourth straight day.

The Jordanian Hashemite Charity Organization was instructed to “send urgent humanitarian aid to the Palestinian people in Gaza who are facing suffering and difficult living conditions due to Israeli attacks,” the royal palace said.

The king also called for the adoption of “urgent procedures needed to... support the Jordanian military field hospital currently working in the Gaza Strip,” the statement said.

The palace said the measures were aimed at providing “all the necessary medical care to children of the brotherly Palestinian people... in view of the difficult circumstances in the face of Israeli aggression.”