The wreckage of a car hit by an Israeli air strike yesterday. (Photo: Thomas Coex/AFP/Getty)

At least 72 people have been killed in the Gaza Strip in the last two days as Israel intensifies its military offensive, Al Jazeera reports.

Israel’s army has also mobilised on the border for a possible ground invasion, with the escalating hostilities marking the most serious surge of violence over the Gaza Strip for two years.

The rising death toll includes many children  including 12  Palestinian minors, the ABC cites hospital officials as saying.

Palestine’s Ministry of Health said 550 people had been wounded in Gaza this week, while Israeli authorities say more than 200 rockets have been fired into Israel from Gaza in that time.

An Israeli aircraft also killed at least one civilian when it targeted a car in the centre of Gaza’s busiest shopping street on Wednesday night local time, the ABC reports.

Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas told a crisis meeting on Wednesday that Israel is committing “genocide,” the

Israelis stand on a hill overlooking the Gaza Strip yesterday, to watch the fighting between the Israeli army and Palestinian militants. (Photo: Menahem Kahana/AFP/Getty Images)

“(T)he killing of entire families is genocide by Israel against our Palestinian people,” he told the meeting of the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank city of Ramallah, News.com.au reports. 

“What’s happening now is a war against the Palestinian people as a whole and not against the (militant) factions… 

that Israel is not defending itself, it is defending settlements, its main project,” Abbas said.

He added Palestinian leaders were talking to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

Israel prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office also said he had discussed the situation with Ban Ki-moon. The UN Security Council will meet on Thursday morning local time to discuss the hostilities,

The surge in violence this week follows outrage over the abduction and killing of three Israeli youths in the occupied West Bank last month, and a retaliatory killing of a Palestinian teenager, who was reportedly burned alive last Wednesday.