The Israeli air force pounded targets in the northern Gaza Strip early on Wednesday, without causing casualties, following rocket fire on southern Israel, sources on both sides said.

Palestinian security sources confirmed the strike had hit a training camp in Beit Lahiya which was used by fighters from the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of the ruling Hamas movement.

Gunmen opened fire on the home of a Coptic Christian in the Sinai peninsula on Saturday, hours after a visit by President Mohammed Morsi to reassured Christian residents they would not be targeted again.

Gunmen "used automatic weapons when they opened fire on the house of a Coptic resident of Rafah hours after the president left," a security official told Agence France Presse.

Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi traveled to the Sinai peninsula on Friday to meet with Coptic families who fled from the town of Rafah after receiving death threats, his Facebook page said.

Morsi was to meet Coptic Christian families "to reassure them," his official page on the social networking site said, as state television broadcast images of him attending Friday prayers at a mosque in North Sinai's capital El-Arish.

A rocket fired from the Gaza Strip crashed into southern Israel on Monday night, without causing casualties or damage, an Israeli military spokesman said.

"The rocket landed in the Ashkelon area without causing any casualties or damage," the spokesman told Agence France Presse.

A ship built in Gaza will sail next year carrying Palestinian exports to international customers, and to challenge Israel's blockade from the inside out, Canadian activists said Wednesday.

The Gaza's Ark project is building a boat using existing resources in the tiny Palestinian enclave to carry Palestinian goods to the outside world, former Canadian Member of Parliament Jim Manly.

Human Rights Watch on Wednesday accused Gaza's ruling Hamas movement of "extensive" rights violations, including torture, warrantless and arbitrary arrests, and unfair trials.

In a report entitled "Abusive System: Criminal Justice in Gaza," the New York-based watchdog alleged that Hamas security services also failed to inform relatives of the whereabouts of detainees, and had arrested and abused lawyers.

A year after the Palestinians went to the United Nations with a historic bid for state membership, president Mahmud Abbas is going back with a trimmed down request for recognition.

With the quest for full membership stalled, Abbas will instead ask the General Assembly to elevate the Palestinians from observer status to that of a U.N. non-member state.

Steps by Gaza's Hamas rulers to crack down on Salafist radicals have created tensions within the enclave that some fear may turn into an armed confrontation.

Although there are only a few hundred Salafists in Gaza, they have made a name for themselves as unafraid to openly challenge Hamas, seeking to outbid them in the fight against Israel and the defence of Islam.

An Israeli air strike on the Gaza Strip killed two Hamas fighters near the Egyptian border late Wednesday, the Islamist movement that controls the Palestinian territory said.

The strike, witnessed by an Agence France Presse photographer, hit a car in the town of Rafah on the territory's southern border with Egypt.

Gaza's Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniya left the coastal strip for neighboring Egypt Monday, after plans for a visit there were postponed twice over the past four days.

Hamas government spokesman Taher al-Nunu told Agence France Presse that Haniya would meet Egyptian premier Hisham Qandil Monday evening for talks "mainly about electricity."