Israeli warning triggers Gaza exodus

Thousands fled their homes in a Gaza town on Sunday after Israel warned them to leave ahead of threatened attacks on rocket-launching sites, on the sixth day of an offensive that Palestinian officials said has killed at least 160 people.

"Those who fail to comply with the instructions will endanger their lives and the lives of their families. Beware," read a leaflet dropped by the Israeli military in the town of Beit Lahiya, near the border with Israel.

Militants in the Islamist-ruled Gaza Strip kept up rockets salvoes deep into the Jewish state and the worst bout of Israel-Palestinian bloodshed in two years showed no signs of abating despite mounting international pressure to cease fire.

A Palestinian woman and a girl, aged 3, were killed in Israeli air strikes early on Sunday, Gaza's Health Ministry said. Hours earlier, the ministry said 18 people were killed when the house of Gaza's police chief was bombed from the air in the single deadliest attack of Israel's offensive.

Despite intensified Israeli military action - which included a commando raid overnight in what was Israel's first reported ground action in Gaza during the current fighting - militants continued to launch rocket after rocket across the border.

A long-range salvo on Sunday morning triggered air raid sirens at Tel Aviv's Ben-Gurion international airport, which has not been hit in the hostilities and where flights have been operating normally, and some city suburbs.

On Saturday night, Hamas - the Islamist movement that rules Gaza - made good on a threat to send rockets streaking toward Tel Aviv at 9 p.m. (2.00 p.m. EDT) and other areas in heavily populated central Israel.

Those rockets and the ones unleashed on Sunday were intercepted by the Israeli-built, and partly US-funded, Iron Dome missile defense system that has proved effective against Hamas's most powerful weaponry.

No one has been killed by the more than 800 rockets the Israeli military said has been fired since the offensive began,

The Gaza Health Ministry said at least 160 Palestinians, including about 135 civilians - among them some 30 children, have been killed six days of warfare, and more than 1,000 have been wounded.

Israeli leaflets dropped on Beit Lahiya, where 70,000 Palestinians live, said civilians in three of its 10 neighborhoods were "requested to evacuate their residences" and move south, deeper into the Gaza Strip, by 12 p.m.

The Gaza Interior Ministry, in a statement on Hamas radio, dismissed the Israeli warnings as "psychological warfare" and instructed those who left their homes to return and others to stay put.

It was the first time Israel had warned Palestinians to vacate dwellings in such a wide area. Previous warnings, by telephone or so-called "knock-on-the-door" missiles without explosive warheads, had been directed at individual homes slated for attack.

At least 4,000 people fled Beit Lahiya and crowded into eight UN-run schools in Gaza City on Sunday, a spokesman for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency said.