Israel is to double the amount of water it channels annually to Palestinians in the blockaded Gaza Strip, a defense ministry body said Wednesday.

A humanitarian crisis has gripped Gaza since a July-August war with Israel, which controls most of the territory's resources, its imports and exports as well as the movement of people.

U.N. Middle East peace envoy Robert Serry criticized the international community Monday over the failure to deliver aid promised for reconstructing Gaza, on his final trip to the Palestinian territory.

Israel and Hamas fought a devastating 50-day war in the besieged coastal enclave last summer which killed more than 2,200 people and left 100,000 Gazans homeless and large swathes of the territory in ruins.

Three Israelis were on Monday charged with smuggling goods into the Gaza Strip knowing they would be used by Hamas to bolster its military infrastructure, officials said.

Micha Peretz, Yehoram Alon and another man whose name has not been released were indicted at Beersheba District Court for trade worth millions of dollars with a Palestinian merchant in Gaza, while fully aware he was transferring the materials to Hamas.

After years of strained relations over the Syrian conflict, Palestinian Islamist group Hamas is looking to mend ties with its traditional backer Iran. But reconciliation is proving far from simple.

The outbreak of Syria's civil war nearly four years ago provoked a rupture between Hamas and Iran, after the movement threw its support behind rebels fighting President Bashar Assad, a close ally of Tehran.

Once again this winter, following days of very heavy rainfall across the region, the banks of a riverbed running through central Gaza were breached, flooding dozens of Palestinian homes.

For the residents, there was no doubt: Israel was responsible after deliberately opening "a dam" to flood the enclave.

World-renowned graffiti artist Banksy has caused a stir in the Gaza Strip, apparently secretly traveling to the Palestinian territory and painting murals on buildings ruined by the latest conflict.

The artist, whose chooses to remain anonymous, released an online video entitled "Make this the year YOU discover a new destination", that purports to show him traveling to Gaza by commercial flight and then through smuggling tunnels -- possibly underneath the Egyptian border.

Israel allowed two Gaza-based Palestinian ministers to travel to the West Bank for a cabinet meeting Thursday for the first time since the unity government took office in June, officials said.

Housing minister Mufid Hasayneh and justice minister Salim al-Saqa passed through the Israeli-controlled Erez border crossing and arrived in Ramallah, government spokesman Ihab Bseiso told AFP.

As a Jewish Israeli Communist running for election under an Arab banner, Dov Khenin is often the butt of jokes. But for some, he is nothing less than a traitor.

In a country where most of the electorate leans to the right, the 57-year-old member of a Communist party that includes both Jewish and Arab lawmakers is used to threats and hate mail.

The failure by world donors to deliver billions of dollars of aid to rebuild Gaza is jeopardizing efforts to avoid a new flareup in the Palestinian territory, a senior U.N. official warned Wednesday.

U.N. political affairs chief Jeffrey Feltman told the Security Council that donors who had promised $5.4 billion to the Palestinians at the Cairo conference four months ago "have yet to fulfill the vast majority of their pledges."

Dozens of young Gazans forced a temporary shutdown of several aid organizations Monday in protest at the killings of three American Muslims of Palestinian origin in North Carolina last week.

"We came here today to close the U.S. institutions for two hours. This event aims to denounce the policy of media blackout that occurred and the U.S. media silence and the U.S. official silence," said activist Jamal Yaghi.