The international community and humanitarian aid groups strongly condemned Israel’s deadly attack on Gaza which killed more than 18 Palestinian civilians, mostly women and children, on Wednesday, the BBC reported.
Palestinian officials said the Israeli attack was caused by a barrage of tank shells which hit a residential neighborhood in the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun.

Thirteen of the dead were said to belong to the same family, and four of them were women and six were children.
Dozens were also wounded in the early morning attack.

An Israeli army spokeswoman claimed that the artillery rounds were fired at Palestinian rocket-launching sites.

But Beit Hanoun residents said they were not aware of any rockets being fired at Israel from the area.

Israeli PM Ehud Olmert ordered a halt to all artillery attacks in Gaza, but the army said it would resume its military operations throughout Gaza, despite the deadly shelling.

The Israeli army said on Tuesday that it withdrew all its ground troops from Beit Hanoun after a week-long operation that killed more than 60 Palestinians, and wounded 200 others, including several civilians.

The Beit Hanoun offensive followed four months of Israeli military operations in Gaza, where more than 300 Palestinians have been killed since an Israeli soldier was captured by Palestinian resistance fighters in late June.

“Black day”

The Palestinian government declared a three-day mourning period in Gaza and the West Bank.

On Thursday, tens of thousands of Palestinians marched through Gaza in funeral processions for the dead, Reuters news agency reported. Beit Hanoun residents hanged posters of some of the dead on walls, and spray-painted some slogans on buildings reading: "Beit Hanoun, our blood is a sacrifice to you."

In the occupied West Bank, residents watched the funeral processions live on television.

"Wednesday was a day of tragedy beyond imagination and Thursday is a sad day, a black day," said Abu Muhammad, a spokesman for the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, an armed faction allied to President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party.

“Horrible massacre”

The Beit Hanoun massacre united President Abbas and Prime Minister Ismail Haniya, of Hamas, who have been at odds over a proposal to form a national unity government that could help lift a Western aid blockade. Both leaders denounced the Israeli attack as an “ugly massacre”, and demanded intervention by the United Nations.

President Abbas also demanded the U.S. "to move to stop Israeli aggression in the Palestinian territories.”

However, Washington’s initial response to the brutal Israeli attack stopped short of reprimanding Israel, whose PM Ehud Olmert is due to meet President George W. Bush in Washington on Monday.

Meanwhile, the European Union said it was "appalled" by the Gaza shelling, describing the attack as “profoundly shocking," AFP reported.
Jordan and Egypt, the only two Arab states that signed peace treaties with Israel, slammed the "horrible massacre" and "immoral and inhumane attack" respectively.

The Arab League chief, Amr Mussa, said that the brutal Israeli attack as an unjustified "massacre of children, women and civilians."
Turkey, an Israeli regional ally, also spoke up against "disproportionate and indiscriminate use of force against (Palestinian) rocket attacks."