Gaza/Tel Aviv - Hamas declared Friday a "day of rage" to mark one week of incessant Israeli air raids in Gaza, and vowed to avenge the killing of a top leader, Nizar Rayan, along with nearly his entire family in one airstrike in northern Gaza the previous afternoon.

Israel continued to focus on, and keep up, its air raids on the seventh day of its offensive, but ground troops were waiting along the Gaza border for orders to enter.

At least eight Palestinians - three of them children - were killed as a military spokesman said Israel pounded 20 more targets overnight and some 35 later throughout the day.

Hamas, too, kept up its rocket attacks, again firing imported Grad missiles into the southern Israeli coastal city of Ashkelon in the morning, where two people were injured. A total of 30 rockets had landed in Israel by the early evening, the military said.

Tens of thousands of Palestinians demonstrated after Friday prayers throughout the West Bank in solidarity with Gaza, with at least 3,000 marching in the central city of Ramallah. Some clashes erupted in Ramallah between Hamas supporters carrying the green flags of their movement and yellow-flag-waving supporters of the Fatah movement of President Mahmoud Abbas.

Thousands more Muslims and Arabs protested elsewhere in the world, including Beirut and Istanbul.

The Palestinian toll after one week of Israel's Operation "Cast Lead" - aimed at curbing rocket and mortar attacks by Palestinian militants at its southern regions - reached
430 dead and 2,200 injured, more them 300 of whom were in serious condition, said Gaza emergency services chief Mo'aweya Hassanein. Four Israelis have been killed and several dozen injured by Palestinian rockets.

Over the past week, more than 700 targets in Gaza have been hit, an army spokeswoman said, while several hundred rockets hit Israel.

After one week in which the Israel Air Force already bombed and rocketed many of the targets more than once, its "pool of targets are close to exhaustion," a senior Israeli government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the Ma'ariv daily.

"After this stage, the ground stage is planned," he said.

But another official said Defence Minister Ehud Barak was trying to buy some time before sending in the ground forces, to give international efforts to reach a diplomatic solution a chance.

The Israeli military meanwhile had completed its preparations for the ground operation, security officials said late Thursday.

Along the Gaza Strip, soldiers could be seen examining their tanks and armoured personnel carriers, while on Thursday evening several trucks carrying more tank shells could be seen coming in from northern Israel.

Infantry soldiers were also rehearsing in a mock city set up at an Israeli army base near the Strip.

Israel permitted nearly 370 Palestinians with foreign passports to leave the Gaza Strip Friday. Some 266 of the foreign passport holders, most of them Russians and Ukrainians, in fact passed through Israel's Erez crossing with northern Gaza, from where they were transported in buses to Jordan, the military said.

Their departure sparked further speculation that the ground offensive was imminent. Israel's Foreign Ministry however said they left Friday, because it had only now received the requests of their respective embassies and coordinated their exit with them.

One of the targets struck Friday was the central Gaza house of Imad Aqal, a top commander of Hamas' armed wing, the al-Qassam Brigades, who oversaw rocket production and the launching of rockets, the Israeli military said. A spokesman said his house was targeted because it stored weapons. Aqal, an aide to Qassam Brigades head Ahmed Jabari, was not at home at the time of the strike.

Many Hamas political and military leaders have vacated their homes and gone underground, but Nizar Rayan, the top political leader killed Thursday, had refused to do so in defiance of Israel.

The Hamas leader, his four wives and 11 of his 12 children were all killed when Israeli rockets all but demolished his house in the crowded refugee camp of Jabaliya, north of Gaza City, in one of the deadliest single Israeli attacks of the offensive.

At least two Palestinians, including a six-year-old girl who died of her wounds in hospital, died in an airstrike on another house in Jabaliya Friday.

The Israeli military denied that it had renewed Israel's policy of targeted killings of top Hamas political leaders.

Rayan's house - not he - had been the target, a spokeswoman in Tel Aviv said, because it stored "large amounts of rockets and explosives." She said Israeli aerial footage of the attack identified "many secondary explosions" proving this, and claimed the people inside had been given an advance warning.

The professor in Islamic philosophy belonged to Hamas' top five leaders and was the highest-ranking political leader killed by Israel since 2004.

Israel assassinated Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in March of that year, and his successor Abdel Aziz Ranteesi in April, also 2004, as part of a series of targeted killings of Hamas leaders.

Hamas threatened to renew suicide bombings in Israel and urged all Palestinian armed groups to avenge his death.

"This hideous crime has left all options open for the resistance to silence this enemy, including martyrdom operations (suicide bombings) and attacking Zionist interests everywhere," said a statement issued by Hamas in Gaza. (dpa)