The Arab League on Sunday condemned the Israeli raids on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and called on the international community to put pressure on the Jewish state to halt the strikes.

The pan-Arab organization "calls on the international community to pressure the Israeli occupation authorities to put an immediate end to this assault," a statement from the League said.

Jordan on Sunday urged an "immediate" halt to Israel's "military escalation" in the Gaza Strip, warning that it threatens regional stability.

"Jordan rejects and condemns Israel's military escalation and operations in Gaza that have killed civilians as well as Egyptian officers," information minister Abdullah Abu Rumman said in a statement carried by the state-run Petra news agency.

Rockets fired from Gaza early Sunday landed across the border in Egypt but caused no casualties, state television reported.

"Several rockets from the Gaza Strip landed this morning in Egyptian territory in the region west of the Rafah terminal, without causing casualties," the television reported.

Israelis and Palestinians woke up to a fourth day of violence on Sunday, with militants firing 17 rockets into Israel despite an unusually quiet night in Gaza just hours after a rocket killed an Israeli.

Tensions in and around the Gaza Strip have soared since Thursday when militants staged a series of bloody shooting attacks in the Negev desert, killing eight Israelis and prompting a wave of bloody tit-for-tat exchanges.

Egypt called on Israel Saturday to immediately halt punitive strikes on the Palestinian Gaza Strip after militants carried out deadly attacks in Israel.

"Egypt denounces the use of force against civilians in any circumstance and strongly advises Israel to immediately stop its military operations against Gaza," a foreign ministry statement said.

Israel and the Palestinians battled each other for a third day on Saturday with rockets fired from Gaza wounding three in southern Israel while Israeli planes attacked the coastal enclave in the early hours.

In a tragic irony, the casualties from Saturday's early-morning rocket fire on the southern Israeli city of Ashdod were all illegal Palestinian workers, sleeping rough.

Lebanon, the Arab member of the U.N. Security Council, on Friday blocked a statement which would have called deadly attacks in southern Israel terrorism, diplomats said.

The move brought criticism from the United States which said the terrorism label is a "standard" Security Council description after such an attack.

Accounts of the attacks that killed eight Israelis near the border with Egypt on Thursday paint a picture of an operation carefully planned and executed.

The triple attacks, attributed by Israel to radical Palestinian activists from the Gaza Strip, took the army and police by surprise, judging by the ensuing confusion and inaccuracy of initial reports.

An Israeli air strike on the southern Gaza town of Rafah killed six people on Thursday, Palestinian medics said, just hours after a string of deadly attacks in southern Israel.

Israeli military sources confirmed that air strikes were carried out in Gaza shortly after three attacks in southern Israel killed at least seven people.

The U.S. Agency for International Development is halting humanitarian assistance to the Gaza Strip over alleged meddling by the enclave's rulers, Hamas, a U.S. official said Friday.

Meanwhile, in neighboring Egypt, tensions between Washington and the country's ruling generals were sparked on news that a notorious Egyptian intelligence apparatus is probing foreign funding of civil society groups.