Several thousand mourners vowed vengeance on Thursday as they buried victims of an Israeli strike that killed mostly women and children, and the Jewish state braced for revenge suicide bombings by Palestinian resistance fighters.
"From our soul, from our blood, we will die for you our martyrs!" chanted mourners as they weaved their way through the streets of Beit Hanun, where 18 civilians were killed in early morning Israeli artillery shelling the day before.
"Revenge, revenge, oh martyrs! Oh, our beloved, the response will be in Tel Aviv," they vowed, waving flags of all the Palestinian factions and occasionally setting off bursts of automatic gunfire into the air.
The funeral procession stretched for hundreds of meters (yards) as mourners collected the bodies of those killed at two separate morgues and then made their way to the new wing of the town's cemetery where the victims were buried, named "The Martyrs of the Beit Hanun Massacre."
Following the Beit Hanun deaths, resistance fighters vowed to unleash suicide bombings inside Israel, nearly two years after factions agreed to abide by an informal truce in such attacks.
"This massacre will push us to avenge ourselves and continue our resistance," Mohammed Nishuane, 23, said as he marched toward the cemetery through the devastated streets of the town, still bearing the scars of a week-long Israeli offensive on gunmen that preceded Wednesday's strike.
"This town has known many black days and this is just one more, perhaps the blackest of them all," said Tayseer al-Masry, a 36-year-old pharmacist who also took part in the procession.
Wednesday's strike was condemned world-wide and prompted moderate Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas to accuse Israel of sinking chances of peace and to declare a three-day mourning period in the territories.
The exiled political supremo of the Palestinian ruling Hamas movement, Khaled Meshaal vowed from his Damascus headquarters that the deaths would be avenged: "The heroes of the resistance... will respond by acts," he warned.
Police throughout Israel were placed on a heightened state of alert following the threats.
The international community called for an immediate halt by the Jewish state of its operations in the coastal strip, which has left more than 300 Palestinians dead since late June when a soldier was seized by militants.
President George W. Bush of the United States, Israel's main and most powerful ally, said he was saddened by the loss of life, but urged "all parties to act with care and restraint so as to avoid any harm to innocent civilians."
Israeli officials offered regret following the strike, which the army said had targeted militants firing rockets into the Jewish state, and offered humanitarian assistance to the dozens of people wounded in the fire.
But while a halt was ordered to all artillery fire in the coastal strip pending an inquiry, officials said the four-month operation against militants would go on, and two gunmen were killed in an air raid late Wednesday in eastern Gaza City.
The UN Security Council was due to hold an open meeting later Thursday in New York on the mounting bloodshed in the Gaza Strip.
The meeting was announced as Qatar, the lone Arab member of the 15-member council, circulated a draft resolution condemning the Israeli "massacre" of Palestinians in Beit Hanun.
Arab foreign ministers, meanwhile, are to hold a special meeting in Cairo on Sunday to discuss the spiralling violence in the Gaza Strip.
Wednesday's deaths, together with 64 Palestinians killed in the Gaza Strip over the previous seven days, brought to more than 80 the number killed in Israeli operations in the territories in a week.