Tens of thousands of mourners joined in an outpouring of national grief yesterday at the burial of three Israeli teenagers whose kidnapping and killing Israel blamed on the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas.

President Shimon Peres, a usually dovish elder statesman, echoed official vows to punish Hamas in his eulogy in the cemetery in the centre of the country.

“I know that the murderers will be found. Israel will act with a heavy hand until terror is uprooted,” he said at the ceremony in Modi’in, a town between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

Israel bombed dozens of sites in the Gaza Strip yesterday, wounding two Palestinians, striking at Hamas a day after finding the bodies of three teenagers in the occupied West Bank, not far from where they went missing while hitchhiking on June 12.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who attended the burial, has promised that Hamas would pay.

Just before the funeral, a recording of a furtive cellphone call one of the abducted teens made to a police emergency number was broadcast on Israeli television stations. “They’ve kidnapped me,” the youngster said. Shouted orders in Arabic-accented Hebrew – “head down, head down”, and the sound of what appeared to be muffled gunfire followed before the call ended.

The military said aircraft attacked 34 targets in Gaza, mostly belonging to Hamas. The military cited 18 Palestinian rockets launched against Israel from Gaza in the past two days.