Ismail Haniya, head of the Hamas government in Gaza, announced a cabinet reshuffle on Sunday, appointing seven new ministers including a new finance minister.

Haniya said the reshuffle was "normal procedure after nearly six years of work by some ministers and in order to achieve specific goals for the current period."

A rocket fired from the Gaza Strip struck a house in southern Israel early on Friday, without causing any injuries, a police spokesman said.

"A rocket hit a house in the town of Sderot, causing damage to the roof. There were no injuries but a resident was hospitalized in a state of shock," said the spokesman, Luba Samri.

A 42-year-old Gazan woman was in critical condition on Wednesday after being shot by Israeli troops near the border in central Gaza, Palestinian medical sources said.

The incident occurred in an area east of the central town of Deir al-Balah.

Israeli aircraft attacked three Hamas training camps in the Gaza Strip early Tuesday, causing no injuries, eyewitnesses in the enclave said.

An Israeli helicopter fired six missiles at two different sites northwest of Gaza city, both training camps for Hamas' military wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, eyewitnesses said.

Three rockets fired from Gaza hit southern Israel on Sunday, damaging two factories in the border town of Sderot but without causing any casualties, the Israeli army said.

"Two rockets hit two factories in the industrial zone in Sderot, while a third exploded in a nearby field," a spokeswoman said, referring to a town of 24,000 people which lies less than a kilometre (half a mile) from the border with the Hamas-run Gaza Strip.

Gaza's Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniya will not attend an upcoming Non-Aligned Movement summit in Tehran, Taher al-Nounou, a spokesman for the Hamas government, said on Sunday.

"The prime minister received a generous invitation from the Iranian president to participate in the NAM summit," he wrote in a statement, adding that Haniya initially "said he might be going but he decided today to apologize."

Egypt decided on Saturday to reopen a border crossing with Gaza it had mostly kept closed since a militant attack killed 16 of its soldiers on August 5, the official MENA news agency reported.

It said the Rafah border crossing, the Palestinian territory's only passage which bypasses Israel, would return to opening six days a week, like before the attack.

Militants wounded three Egyptian policemen in the Sinai Peninsula on Saturday in an ambush of their vehicle with a rocket propelled grenade, a security official said.

The militants attacked the policemen near the north Sinai town of Sheikh Zuwayid, roughly 15 kilometers (9 miles) west of the Gaza border, as the policemen were returning from an operation, the official said.

"We have carried out 800 open-heart surgeries, regulated traffic, and built 44 schools," billboards boldly proclaim in white letters on a vibrant magenta background.

Not the proud boast of a Scandinavian country, but a publicity campaign undertaken by the Gaza Strip's Hamas government, which has plastered news of its achievements at road junctions, in the across newspapers, on the Internet and even on the radio.

A Gaza official says Egypt is opening its border crossing with the Hamas-ruled coastal territory for three days ahead of a major Muslim holiday this weekend.

Maher Abu Sabha of the Gaza border authority says the crossing will open to traffic in both directions later on Tuesday.