Inas al-Shaloudy, the mother of the driver, Abdel Rahman al-Shaloudy, said border police officers arrived "in large numbers" on Wednesday at 1 a.m. and evacuated about 50 people from her five-story building and nearby structures. Huddled with the group in a protest tent, she said she heard an explosion at 4 a.m. and returned an hour later to find her apartment filled with broken glass, its inner walls destroyed, and those of her neighbors cracked. "This is not only collective punishment, it is a call for a violent reaction," said Ms. Shaloudy, 43, who teaches English.

Amnesty International published a report early Wednesday accusing Israel of war crimes in its 50-day war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip this summer, saying its military showed "callous indifference" to civilians in airstrikes on homes that felled entire families.

An examination of an Israeli barrage that put a line of at least 10 shells through a United Nations school sheltering displaced Palestinians here last week suggests that Israeli troops paid little heed to warnings to safeguard such sites and may have unleashed weapons inappropriate for urban areas despite rising alarm over civilian deaths.

Hamas leaders assert that the clash on Friday had occurred at 7 a.m., an hour before the onset of the cease-fire secured by the United Nations and Secretary of State John Kerry. Additionally Hamas says that they have no idea about the disappearance of the Israeli soldier.

The strikes came in rapid succession. At around 5 a.m. Wednesday at a United Nations school at the Jabaliya refugee camp, where 3,300 Palestinians had taken refuge from the fierce fighting in their Gaza neighborhoods, what appeared to be four Israeli artillery shells hit the compound.

For more than a week, as the war engulfed their homes, families in this northern Gaza town packed up their belongings and children and headed to the one place they presumed would remain safe: the United Nations school. But in the last few days, the war approached there as well. The Israeli military warned on Monday that the shelter should be evacuated. By Thursday, the United Nations had decided to withdraw its staff and to stop providing food. Then, as the Palestinians gathered in the courtyard on Thursday, believing they were about to be bused elsewhere, blasts tore through the crowd, killing 16 people and sending scores of wounded, mostly women and children, streaming into local hospitals.

As Israel s air war against Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters in Gaza entered its sixth day on Saturday, a pair of bombings threw the difficulties of the campaign into painful relief: Israel bombed a mosque, which its aerial photos indicated was harboring a weapons cache, and a center for the handicapped, killing two handicapped patients and wounding three, as well as a caretaker.