Israelis living on the frontier with Gaza have fled in their thousands from fighting that turned rural backwaters into combat zones and after weeks away, many are still too scared to go home.

The thud of falling mortar rounds and the scream of incoming rockets have been part of the soundtrack to life on the border for years.

Five Palestinians and an Italian journalist were killed in Gaza Wednesday when Israeli ordnance detonated as experts tried to disable it just hours before the end of a 72-hour truce.

The blast occurred in the northern town of Beit Lahiya as Egyptian mediators scrambled to persuade Israeli and Palestinian negotiators to extend a three-day ceasefire, which expires at midnight (2100 GMT).

Negotiators in Cairo addressed the thorny issue of the Israeli Gaza blockade on Tuesday night, as the second day of a 72-hour truce neared its end.

As Gaza's residents ventured out to try to piece together their battered lives, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators held a second round of indirect talks aimed at finding a durable end to the five-week confrontation.

Israel lashed out on Tuesday after the U.N. Human Rights Council named the man who will be running an inquiry into its Gaza offensive.

Canadian international lawyer William Schabas, who will head the commission, is widely regarded in Israel as being hostile to the Jewish state over reported calls to bring Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu before the International Criminal Court.

A coalition of activists said on Tuesday they would send a flotilla of ships to break Israel's siege of Gaza by the end of 2014, fours years after a similar campaign ended in a deadly raid by Israeli commandos.

"We plan to send the flotilla during 2014," the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, which includes activists from at least 10 countries, said in Istanbul.

Israel expressed concern recently that Hizbullah might be using smuggling tunnels in the Jewish state's north similar to those build by Hamas in the south, media reports said on Tuesday.

However, the head of the Israeli Northern Command, Major General Yair Golan, assured that these tunnels, if they exist, don't pose a threat along the frontier with Lebanon as reports remain baseless.

The Foreign Press Association on Monday lodged a strong protest accusing the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas of harassment and of threatening foreign reporters working in Gaza.

The association for journalists working in Israel and the Palestinian territories said Hamas authorities and their representatives employed "blatant, incessant, forceful and unorthodox methods" against visiting international journalists covering the Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza.

Lana Del Rey has become the latest Western musician to call off a concert in Israel as security fears from the Gaza conflict take a toll on the entertainment industry.

The U.S. pop balladeer, whose latest album "Ultraviolence" debuted at number one on the U.S. charts, had been scheduled to play her first concert in Israel at Tel Aviv's Nokia Arena on August 20.

An Israeli delegation arrived in Cairo on Monday for indirect negotiations with Palestinians on a durable truce in Gaza, Egypt and Israeli officials said.

The Palestinian delegation meanwhile was already locked in talks with Egyptian intelligence mediators, who will relay their demands to the Israeli negotiators, a Palestinian official said.

After two hours waist-deep in the sea, Sameer al-Hissi says his paltry haul of tiny fish is not the only consequence he and Gaza's fishermen are suffering from Israel's offensive.

Ashore, he lifts up his t-shirt to show red-brown blotches across his chest and stomach, the result, he says, of spending his mornings in a sea heavily tainted with smelly sewage since Israeli strikes knocked out the power station supplying electricity to treatment plants.