Palestinian militants resumed rocket attacks on Tel Aviv yesterday after a 24-hour lull in strikes on the Israeli commercial capital, and Israel kept up its air and naval bombardments of the Gaza Strip despite growing international pressure for a ceasefire.

The military said it had shot down a drone from Gaza, the first reported deployment of an unmanned aircraft by Palestinian militants whose rocket attacks have been regularly intercepted.

The use of a drone would mark a step up in the sophistication of the Palestinian arsenal, although it was not immediately clear whether it was armed.

Around half a dozen Israelis have been wounded since the start of the week-old offensive, which Gaza health officials say has killed 169 Palestinians, most of them civilians.

Around a quarter of the town of Beit Lahuija’s 70,000 residents have fled

The worst flare-up of Israeli-Palestinian violence for almost two years was sparked by the murder of three Israeli teenagers and revenge killing of a Palestinian youth. (See box on right.)

The European Union said it was in touch with “all parties in the region” to press for an immediate halt to the hostilities, a day after Kerry offered to help secure a Gaza truce.

With international calls mounting for a ceasefire, Egyptian media said US Secretary John Kerry was due in Cairo today for talks on the Gaza situation.

Egypt and Qatar are seen as potential mediators but peace efforts were complicated by Hamas’s rejection of a mere “calm for calm” in which both sides hold their fire in favour of wider conditions including prisoner release and an end to Israel’s Gaza blockade.

The Israeli army said its aircraft and naval gunboats attacked dozens of targets in the Gaza Strip and that Palestinian militants fired more than 20 rockets into Israel, slightly wounding a boy in the town of Ashdod, where a home was damaged. Palestinian health officials said at least 20 people in Gaza were wounded.

But Israel did not carry out a threat to step up attacks against rocket-launching sites it said were hidden among civilian homes in the town of Beit Lahuiya after urging residents there to leave.

A UN aid agency said around a quarter of the town’s 70,000 residents had fled.

Tel Aviv experienced a rare lull in morning rocket strikes, but they resumed during the evening rush hour, with the Iron Dome missile interceptor system going into action. Police said there were no casualties or damage.

Three confess to revenge slaying of Palestinian

Three Israeli Jews arrested for the murder of a Palestinian teenager have confessed to abducting him and burning him alive, officials said yesterday, an incident that helped trigger a week of Israeli-Hamas fighting around the Gaza strip.

Easing a court gag order on the case, Israel said the suspects, two of them minors, had told interrogators that in killing Mohammed Abu Khudair they sought revenge for the murder of three Jewish seminary students in the occupied West Bank last month.

The adult suspect facing the gravest allegations might plead mitigation in citing past mental illness.

“I expect soon to get the investigative material, in which I will look for support for the assessment there is a complex problem in the matter of my client’s criminal culpability,” an attorney for Honenu, an ultranationalist legal aid organisation, said.

According to Israel’s Shin Bet security agency, in the early hours of July 2, as Muslims marked the end of the daylight Ramadan fast, the three suspects “patrolled Arab neighbourhoods of Jerusalem for a number of hours, in an attempt to find a victim to abduct, until they spotted Mohammed Abu Khudair”.

Bundling him into their car, they drove to a forest outside the city where the 29-year-old suspect beat him on the head with a tyre iron (wheel brace) and, helped by the two 17-year-olds, doused him with fuel and lit it, the Shin Bet said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had deplored Abu Khudair’s murder as “loathsome”.

He ordered police to find the culprits swiftly and pledged to see them prosecuted to the full.