AN Israeli air strike has destroyed a high-rise building that housed The Associated Press' offices in the Gaza Strip.

The air strike came roughly an hour after the Israeli military ordered people to evacuate the building.

There was no immediate explanation over why the building was targeted.

The building housed The Associated Press, Al-Jazeera and a number of offices and apartments.

It comes after an Israeli air raid in Gaza City killed at least 10 Palestinians, mostly children, in the deadliest single strike this week.

There were also widespread Palestinian protests yesterday in the occupied West Bank, where Israeli forces shot and killed 11 people.

Palestinians are marking Nakba day today, when they commemorate the estimated 700,000 people who fled or were driven from their homes in what is now Israel during the 1948 war surrounding its creation, raising the possibility of more unrest.

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US diplomat Hady Amr arrived in the region yesterday as part of Washington's efforts to de-escalate tensions, and the UN Security Council is also set to meet on tomorrow.

But Israel turned down an Egyptian proposal for a one-year truce that Hamas rulers had accepted, according to an Egyptian source.

In Gaza, at least 126 people have been killed, including 31 children and 20 women. In Israel, seven people have been killed, including a six-year-old boy and a soldier.

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Early today, an air strike hit a three-story house in Gaza City's Shati refugee camp, killing eight children and two women from an extended family.

Mohammed Hadidi told reporters his wife and five children had gone to celebrate the Eid al-Fitr holiday with relatives.

She and three of the children, aged between six and 14, were killed, while an 11-year-old is missing. Only his five-month-old son Omar is known to have survived.

Shortly afterward, Hamas said it fired a salvo of rockets at southern Israel in response to the air strike.