An Israeli air strike killed three Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip on Friday, Nov 1, the enclave's Hamas rulers said, the most killed in an incident on the frontier in months.

According to Reuters, the Israeli military said in a statement its aircraft targeted a tunnel used by Palestinian militants to carry out attacks on Israelis and accused Hamas of breaching a ceasefire reached a year ago, after an eight-day cross-border war.

On Thursday one Palestinian militant was killed and five Israeli soldiers wounded in a clash that broke out after Israeli forces detonated part of a different Gaza tunnel. Hamas said it had dug the tunnel, which Israel said ran into its territory and was intended for carrying out attacks on its soldiers and civilians.

The Israel-Gaza frontier had been mostly quiet for the past year after the Jewish state and Islamist Hamas ended a brief war last November in an Egyptian-brokered truce.

On Monday Gaza militants fired two rockets at a southern Israeli coastal city and Israel bombed what it said were two concealed rocket launchers in northern Gaza. There were no casualties in that incident.