Beit Hanoun, Gaza Strip ? This battered and broken Gaza town was filled with the wails of mourning Thursday, interspersed with bursts of automatic weapons aimed at the sky and the fiery blaring of loudspeakers exhorting Palestinians to attack Israel.

Throughout the city, plastic chairs for those coming to pay their condolences were lined in front of houses where people died during the six-day Israeli military operation aimed at rooting out extremists firing Qassam rockets at Israel. More than 50 Palestinians were killed in the street fighting that ended Tuesday morning, most of them gunmen.

But emotions were at their most fevered in front of a cluster of houses where, just before dawn Wednesday, 18 people – mostly women and children of the same extended family – were killed when artillery shells fired from Israel slashed into the tightly packed neighborhood.

On both sides of the tiny side street the condolence chairs were placed atop the rubble, scattered sandals of the victims and dried splotches of blood from the attack. Hundreds of women in jilbabs and head scarves at one point chanted, “With souls and blood we sacrifice for you martyrs.”

An Arab Israeli member of the Knesset, Mohammad Barakeh, arrived to offer condolences but quickly was encircled by screaming and gesturing women. He retreated minutes later, protected by several members of the Palestinian Authority’s presidential guards.

A short time later, the bodies of the victims, including that of a tiny girl, draped in the flags of the various Palestinian groups, were carried on canvas stretchers down the thronged street, to be buried in a nearby, just-opened cemetery.

Palestinian mourners carry the body of 3-year-old Maysa Al-Athamna during her funeral in the town of Beit Hanoun, northern Gaza Strip. Thousands of grieving Palestinians crammed into a makeshift cemetery Thursday to mourn the 18 people - mostly women and children - killed when a barrage of Israeli shells tore through their homes as they slept.

The Israelis announced Thursday a technical malfunction caused the shells to hit the neighborhood and apologized – but not before a Hamas leader urged his followers to strike back at Israel, prompting worries that violence in the region was once again about to escalate.

Whether that happens is difficult to predict. Hamas, the Islamic fundamentalist group, is at an awkward crossroad. If it mounts suicide attacks inside Israel after adhering to its unilateral truce for more than a year and a half, it likely will backslide in its efforts to achieve international legitimacy.

A day after Khaled Mashaal, the exiled Hamas leader, ominously called for such attacks, he was on the phone with Mamoud Abbas, the moderate president of the Palestinian Authority, talking about forming a national unity government to replace the present Hamas-dominated and isolated government.

Experts saw little chance that the horrific shelling would lead to a dramatic and sustained leap in violence.

“While I am no prophet, I have a feeling this again is just one of those storms that pass through our area every so often, and it will be forgotten in a few weeks and then we will wait for the next one,” said Shlomo Gazit, a former major general and head of intelligence in the Israeli Defense Force.