Palestinians accuse Israel of breaking 7-hour Gaza truce as child killed

Palestinians accused Israel of breaking its own ceasefire on Aug. 4 by launching a bomb attack on a refugee camp in Gaza City that killed an eight-year-old girl and wounded 29 other people.
   
Gaza Health Ministry spokesman Ashraf Al-Qidra said the strike on a house in Shati camp took place after the truce was scheduled to start on Monday morning.
   
An Israeli military spokeswoman said she was checking the report.
  
Israel announced a seven-hour ceasefire to facilitate the entry of humanitarian aid and allow some of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced by an almost four-week-old war to go home.
   
The announcement met with suspicion from Gaza's dominant Hamas Islamists and followed unusually strong censure from Washington at the apparent Israeli shelling on Sunday of a U.N.-run shelter that killed 10 people.
   
An Israeli defence official said the ceasefire, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. (0700 to 1400 GMT), would apply everywhere but areas of the southern town of Rafah where ground forces have intensified assaults after three soldiers died in a Hamas ambush there on Friday.
   
"If the truce is breached, the military will return fire during the declared duration of the truce," the official said. The official said east Rafah was the only urban area in which troops and tanks were still present, having been withdrawn or redeployed near Gaza's border with Israel over the weekend.
   
Mark Regev, spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said Israel's goal was "to assist with the humanitarian relief" of the people of Gaza.
   
"Unfortunately, I understand that Hamas has publicly rejected the ceasefire, and that would be the eighth ceasefire...