Of the rockets fired by Hamas, 875 fell inside Gaza, according to the official — some of them fired at Israeli ground forces who had entered the Palestinian coastal territory, some that were aimed at Israeli territory but misfired. The official said he believed that still others were fired intentionally at the local Palestinian population, “from what I saw in the systems.”

A big difference between this conflict and Israel’s last ground invasion of Gaza, in 2008-9, he said, was that most sites used to fire rockets were concealed underground, and operatives were able to move through an extensive tunnel network from the insides of homes to launch sites and back again, remaining unseen and hard to reach.

On the contentious issue of Palestinian casualties, Israeli intelligence says it has confirmed the deaths of 341 Hamas operatives, 182 members of Islamic Jihad and 93 other militants who belonged to smaller groups or whose affiliation is not yet known. Another 706 of the 2,127 Palestinians killed have so far been identified by Israel as civilians, while 805 more casualties — 38 percent of the total — are listed as “unknown,” not yet categorized by Israel as either civilians or combatants. The United Nations and other monitoring groups say up to three-quarters of the Palestinians killed were civilians.