Gaza City - An Israeli airstrike on a mosque in the northern Gaza Strip killed 11 people late Saturday afternoon, and wounded 50 others, 24 of them seriously, Palestinian sources reported.

An Israeli military spokesman had no immediate comment on the report, which comes on the eighth day of an Israeli offensive, mainly conducted through aerial attacks on the Gaza Strip.

A second airstrike on Rafah, at the southern end of the Strip, killed four people, Palestinians said, bringing the death toll from Israeli operations Saturday to 19 Palestinians.

London  - Thousands of people took to the streets of London and other British cities Saturday to protest the Israeli raids on the Gaza Strip.

Estimates of those taking part in the demonstration in London ranged between 6,000 and 10,000. Witnesses said around 1,000 shoes were thrown at the fence protecting the Downing Street entrance to the residence of Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

The shoe-hurling - an extreme insult in Arab culture - was reminiscent of that by an Iraqi reporter targeting US President George W Bush at a press conference in Baghdad last month.

Washington  - US President George W Bush on Friday called for a "meaningful ceasefire" to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East after a week of Israeli air raids on the Gaza Strip and missile attacks by the militant Islamic group Hamas into Israel.

In his weekly radio address to be delivered Saturday, Bush blamed the situation on Hamas' violation of a ceasefire to which Israel was forced to respond and stressed that any newly brokered ceasefire must be upheld by both parties.

Cairo - The Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas' loss has been "very small" during the Israeli offensive on Gaza, the group's spiritual leader, Khaled Mishaal, said on Friday.
"Hamas loss is small, very small," Mishaal, the group's politburo chief, said in a statement broadcast live on al-Jazeera TV.
In his second TV appearance since the attack started seven days ago, the top leader of the hard-line Palestinian faction, who lives in exile, said that Israel failed to hit the group's military targets.
Over the past week, more than 700 targets in Gaza have been hit, an army spokeswoman said, while hundreds of rockets fired by Hamas hit Israel.

New York  - With the Israel-Hamas fighting showing no signs of a lull, Arab governments have called for talks in New York next week hoping to compel the UN Security Council to issue a ceasefire order to the warring parties, diplomats said Friday.

The foreign ministers of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Qatar, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Morocco and Iraq, and the president of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas, will be at UN headquarters to discuss their proposal for a ceasefire in the current conflict in Gaza Strip.

The Arabs have presented a draft resolution calling for a ceasefire, which was under discussion by UN legal experts. The proposal was not picked up by the 15-nation council on Wednesday because Western governments considered it anti-Israel.

Demonstrations were held around the world in reaction to the ongoing Israeli military action in the Gaza Strip which in seven days has left at least 420 Palestinians dead and thousands injured.

In the world's most populous Muslim country Indonesia, more than 10,000 people rallied outside the US embassy in Jakarta on Friday to protest the Gaza Strip attacks and condemn the United States for supporting the Israel.

It was the biggest protest in support of the Palestinians in Indonesia since the airstrikes were launched on Saturday in what Israel says is a defensive move to halt rocket attacks on Israeli territory by Palestinian militants.