By Nidal al-Mughrabi
GAZA (Reuters) - Israeli tank fire killed two small boys sheltering at a United Nations school in Gaza on Saturday and Hamas vowed to fight on until Israel meets its demands, suggesting it will ignore any unilateral Israeli ceasefire.
"These two little boys are as innocent, indisputably, as they are dead," John Ging, head of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in Gaza, told Reuters after the school was hit.
The Israeli army was checking the report.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has asked his security cabinet to meet at 7.30 p.m. (5:30 p.m. British time) to debate a halt to an offensive that has killed about 1,200 Palestinians -- equalling the death toll Israel inflicted in its 2006 war with Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Olmert will address the nation at 10 p.m., officials said.
Israel might end its three-week-old assault without reaching any Egyptian-brokered deal with Hamas, political sources said.
Hamas negotiators were due to meet Egyptian officials in Cairo to discuss Israel's response to truce terms offered by the Islamist movement which controls the Gaza Strip.
"Either we hear what we have demanded or the result will be the continuation of confrontation on the ground," Osama Hamdan, Hamas's representative in Lebanon, declared in Beirut.
Egypt has been trying to broker a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas as both sides refuse to deal directly with each other.
Hamas has offered a one-year, renewable truce on condition that all Israeli forces leave Gaza within a week and that all the border crossings with Israel and Egypt are opened.
Aside from aid, crossings have been closed by an Israeli-led blockade since Hamas seized control of Gaza in 2007.
Israel might want to halt the Gaza offensive before Barack Obama is sworn in as U.S. president on Tuesday, to avoid clouding a historic day for its main ally. Israelis mostly back the war, but much of the world wants the bloodshed to stop.
At least 1,201 Palestinians have been killed, including 410 children, and 5,300 wounded, among them 1,630 children, according to the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza.
Ten Israeli soldiers and three civilians, hit by rockets fired from Gaza, have been killed since Israel launched an air attack on December 27 and sent in ground forces a week later.
WAR CRIME?
Ging, the UNRWA chief, said Israeli tank fire killed the two brothers, aged 5 and 7, as they were sheltering at an UNRWA school in the northern town of Beit Lahiya. Their mother, who was among 14 wounded, had her legs blown off.
"The question now being asked is: is this and the killing of all other innocent civilians in Gaza a war crime?" Ging said.
About 45,000 Gazans fleeing battle zones are sheltering in U.N.-run schools in the enclave. Israeli shelling killed 42 people who had taken refuge at a U.N. school on January 6. An UNRWA compound was hit twice on Thursday and three staff were wounded.
Many Gazans are desperate for an end to the fighting.
"We do not care how, we want a ceasefire. We want to go back to our homes. Our children need to go back to sleep in their beds," said Ali Hassan, 34, a father of five, who fled 15 days ago from north Gaza to stay with a brother in the city centre.
The Israeli army said it had attacked 50 targets overnight, including 16 tunnels, two mosques from which gunmen had fired on troops, three bunkers, eight rocket-launching pads and six mined areas including a booby-trapped building.
Dismissing notions of "proportionate" response, Israel has used devastating firepower for the past three weeks to stop militants firing rockets at Israel civilians in southern cities.
The rockets have tapered off but not ceased. At least seven were fired on Saturday, causing no casualties, the army said.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who is visiting the region, again called for an end to the conflict.
"We must remember that there is no military solution to the challenges facing this region," he told the Lebanese parliament.
Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, hoping to succeed Olmert when Israel votes on February 10, said on Friday the war need not end "in agreement with Hamas but rather in arrangements against Hamas."
She was in Washington sealing a pact for U.S. help to ensure Hamas no longer smuggles arms to Gaza via Egypt.
(Additional reporting by Ori Lewis in Jerusalem and Yara Bayoumy and Lou Charbonneau in Beirut)
(Writing by Alistair Lyon)
