The United Nations Security Council will meet tomorrow at the request of the United States to discuss Palestinian rocket and mortar attacks on Israel, diplomats said.
The US circulated a draft statement today calling on the council to condemn "in the strongest terms the indiscriminate firing of rockets by Palestinian militants in Gaza" toward Israel, according to a copy of the text seen by AFP.
It comes after reports that Israel and Palestinian militant factions agreed a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip were denied by an Israeli official.
"The report about a ceasefire is incorrect," said the official, who declined to be named.
Palestinian militants launched their heaviest barrages against Israel since the 2014 Gaza war and Israeli aircraft struck back, in a surge of fighting after weeks of border violence.
Three Israeli soldiers were wounded by shrapnel, the military said, after dozens of mortar bombs and rockets were fired from the Gaza Strip, triggering warning sirens in southern Israel throughout the day.
There were no immediate reports of Palestinian casualties.
Israel has long said it will not tolerate such attacks, and its warplanes hit more than 30 targets belonging to armed groups, including a cross-border tunnel under construction, the military said.
In a statement, the Embassy of Israel said that Hamas was responsible for the attacks from the Gaza Strip.
It also said that Israel will "continue to act with determination to save lives and protect the security of its citizens."
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the barrages, which came after pro-Iran Islamic Jihad vowed to take revenge for the killing of three of its members on Sunday by Israeli tank shelling.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu convened his security chiefs and Intelligence Minister Israel Katz said the country was "at the closest point to the threshold of war" since the seven-week conflict with Palestinian militants four years ago.
"If the firing (from Gaza) does not stop, we will have to escalate our responses and it could lead to a deterioration of the situation," Mr Katz said on Army Radio.
Daoud Shehab, an Islamic Jihad spokesman, said Egyptian officials had been in contact with the group to try to restore calm.
He said Islamic Jihad did not want the violence to escalate and blamed Israel for the flare-up.
"If Israel abides by calm and ceases all forms of aggression against our people in Gaza, we will also maintain calm," he said.
Lieutenant-Colonel Jonathan Conricus, a spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), said the most extensive strikes from Gaza since the 2014 war also drew "the largest IDF retaliatory attack" since that conflict.
The Israeli military said more than 25 projectiles were fired today.
Several were shot down by its Iron Dome rocket interceptor system while others landed in empty lots and farmland.
One exploded in the yard of a kindergarten, damaging its walls and scattering the playground with debris and shrapnel, about an hour before it was scheduled to open for the day.
Violence has soared along the Gaza frontier in recent weeks, during which 116 Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire at mass demonstrations calling for Palestinians' right to return to ancestral lands now in Israel.
They peaked on 14 May, when at least 61 Palestinians were killed as tens of thousands of Gazans protested and clashes erupted on the same day of the US transfer of its embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
A Hamas spokesman defended today’s attacks as a "natural response to Israeli crimes".
An Islamic Jihad spokesman said "the blood of our people is not cheap".
