The bloodshed in Gaza showed no sign of letting up Saturday, with 50 Palestinians reported killed amid renewed Israeli shelling following accusations that Palestinian militants captured an Israeli soldier.
The fate of the soldier, identified by the Israel Defense Forces as 2nd Lt. Hadar Goldin, remains unclear.
And each side blames the other for the collapse of an attempted cease-fire in Friday, which disintegrated before it ever really took hold.
Pointing the finger at Hamas and its militant allies for the attack, in which Goldin went missing and two other soldiers were killed, Israel resumed shelling on what it has described as militant strongholds in Gaza.
As of Saturday, the overall Palestinian death toll has risen to 1,650, with more than 8,900 wounded, said Dr. Ashraf el-Qedra, spokesman for the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza, on his Facebook page.
The IDF said Saturday morning that it had hit 200 "terror targets" in Gaza in the past 24 hours, including "tunnels, weapon manufacturing and storage facilities, and command and control centers."
A huge pre-dawn blast rocked Gaza as the Islamic University was apparently hit by Israeli shelling. According to the IDF, it was targeting "a Hamas military wing facility that was used for research and development of weapon manufacturing" within the university.
Shelling also targeted weapons caches and Hamas facilities within five mosques, it said.
In addition, Israeli aircraft targeted a missile launcher used to fire at Tel Aviv early Saturday, the IDF said. In the past 24 hours, 65 rockets have been fired into Israel, the IDF said, 11 of which were intercepted.
The missing soldier
By late Friday, there was no claim of responsibility for the capture of the missing soldier.
But speculation about his fate took a turn after the armed wing of Hamas, the al Qassam Brigades, announced it had lost contact with a group of its fighters in the Rafah area -- the same area where Goldin, age 23, was reportedly taken.
In a statement posted on its website, the militant group says it assumes that all of the fighters were killed in an Israeli airstrike, including possibly a soldier that Israel claims was captured. The statement stopped short of definitively saying the soldier was captured, using the phrasing "assuming he was captured by the fighters."
The group "has no information till this moment about the missing soldier, his place, or the circumstances of his disappearance," it added.
Hamas spokesman Osama Hamdan denied any capture happened.
"It's clear that the capture of the soldier is an Israeli story; there's nothing from the resistance saying there was a capture," he told CNN.
Ceasefire initiative
As the conflict intensified Saturday, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi said that an Egyptian cease-fire initiative -- involving negotiators from the Israeli and Palestinian sides -- was a "real chance" to stop the bloodshed and the best way to get help into Gaza and launch talks.
An Egyptian proposal put forward last month was accepted by Israel but rejected by Hamas.
An official Palestinian delegation is en route to Cairo to attend the negotiations, Hanan Ashrawi, executive committee member of the Palestine Liberation Organization in the West Bank, told CNN's "New Day." It's made up of five PLO members, five from Hamas and two from Islamic Jihad, another militant group in Gaza.
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