Riyadh  - Saudi Arabian King Abdullah Bin Abdul-Aziz called on Thursday for an urgent national aid campaign for the people in Gaza, Saudi news agency reported.

Since the start of Israeli air strikes on Gaza on Saturday, some 400 people have died and more than 2,100 have been injured.

King Abdullah said that the aid campaign will be supervised by Saudi Minister of Interior Naif bin Abdul-Aziz.

Saudi Arabia has sent aid planes with medicine to Gaza. It also allocated special planes to evacuate the injured from Gaza to Saudi hospitals for treatment.

Saudi Arabia and other US allied Arab states such as Egypt and Jordan have come under fire in the Arab world for not doing enough to help Gaza.

Gaza/Tel Aviv - Israel edged closer Thursday toward a ground invasion of the Gaza Strip, but also intensified contacts with foreign leaders seeking a diplomatic solution to the Gaza crisis.

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni traveled to Paris to discuss "different ideas about what can be done on the diplomatic level" with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, said Yigal Palmor, a senior advisor to Livni.

Paris - French President Nicolas Sarkozy received Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni on Thursday for urgent talks on trying to end the latest Gaza Strip crisis.

The talks were already overshadowed by an Israeli rejection of a call by the European Union for a 48-hour truce in the hostilities.

Sarkozy is to travel to the Mideast region starting next Monday to continue his mediation efforts, with visits to Cairo, Ramallah and Jerusalem, Elysee Palace said.

Gaza  - Ismail Haniya, the Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip, radiated defiance on Wednesday night when he made his first televised speech after days of intense Israeli air raids on the salient.

Outwardly, Hamas, which has administered the Strip since June 2007, exudes confidence, saying that despite the Israeli attacks, it is still unbroken. The organization's military capability is more or less intact and its militants not only continue to fire missiles, but have been targeting cities deep inside Israel, which previously had not been hit.

Cairo - After six day of continuous Israeli air raids on the nearby Gaza Strip, the Egyptian border town of Rafah has become a ghost town as residents flee the city.

Airstrikes in neighboring Gaza have shattered glass in the buildings of Rafah. Electricity had also been cut because of the raids.

Thus, Israeli raid are causing pain not just for Gazans, but also for Egyptians as well. The town of Rafah is split by the border, with half of it in Gaza. Many have family on the other side.

The town, which usually makes money by smuggling goods into Gaza, has now been transformed into a transit point for aid to the Gaza strip.

Gaza/Tel Aviv - Israel resisted mounting international calls Wednesday to cease hostilities in the Gaza Strip, with its security cabinet rejecting a French proposal for a
48-hour truce to allow humanitarian aid to flow into the enclave.

Vowing to continue until its goals were achieved and a "durable" solution was found to seven years of rocket and mortar attacks by Palestinian militants from the coastal salient, there was no let up in Israeli airstrikes on the fifth day of the offensive.