Arab foreign ministers meeting in Cairo are expected to demand that Israel immediately halt its campaign in Gaza, and to discuss sending a delegation of ministers there, an Arab diplomat says.
The pan-Arab body announced on Wednesday its decision to hold emergency talks in response to Israeli air strikes in Gaza, which have killed 40 Gazans and wounded more than 350.
The Arab diplomats 'will seek an immediate end to the Israeli aggression and stress their full support for the Gaza Strip', the diplomat said on Saturday.
They will also consider sending a delegation headed by Arab League chief Nabil al-Arabi and other foreign ministers into Gaza 'to stress support for the Palestinian people'.
'The final statement will stress the importance of (Palestinian) national reconciliation as a pressing matter in the face of the aggression,' the diplomat said.
The ministers will also 'stress their support for Egyptian efforts to achieve a long-term truce between Israel and the Palestinian factions in Gaza'.
Israel's harshest Gaza operation in four years began on Wednesday and was followed by fresh Israeli air strikes, as Palestinian militants inside Gaza responded with rocket fire.
Israeli strikes on Gaza killed 10 Palestinians and destroyed the Hamas government headquarters on Saturday as the Jewish state called up thousands more reservists for a possible ground war.
Meanwhile, a senior Iranian official has denied his country supplied the Fajr 5 missiles which Palestinian militants have been firing at Tel Aviv, Iran's Al-Alam television reports.
'We deny having delivered the Fajr 5 to the Palestinian resistance. The aim of such accusations is to portray the resistance as weak whereas it is perfectly capable of producing the arms it needs,' said Allaeddine Boroujerdi, head of parliament's foreign affairs committee, on Saturday.
Islamic Jihad claimed its militants fired a Fajr 5 which crashed into the sea off Tel Aviv on Thursday, in the first such attack on the heart of Israel since Saddam Hussin's Iraqi regime fired Scud missiles during the 1991 Gulf war.
Sirens went off in Tel Aviv again on Saturday for a third straight day, sending people scuttling for cover, a day after a rocket crashed into the Mediterranean near the city centre, AFP correspondents said.
The latest rocket was intercepted by Israel's Iron Dome defence system.
The armed wing of the Islamist Hamas movement, which rules Gaza and which like Islamic Jihad is supported by Tehran, claimed the latest Fajr 5 fire.
The Fajr 5 rocket has a far greater range than the home-produced Qassam rockets normally used by Palestinian militants in Gaza to target Israel, but neither are very accurate, defence analysts say.
Fajr 5 rockets can be fired from the back of a 6x6 truck to hit targets up to 75 kilometres away. This compares to a range of between four and 13 kilometres for the Qassam rockets.
