Egyptian police closed the Rafah border crossing with Gaza on Friday in protest at the kidnapping of colleagues in the Sinai peninsula, a security source and witnesses said.

Three policemen and four soldiers were abducted on Thursday by armed men who are demanding the release of a group of prisoners held at a police station in the North Sinai town of El-Arish, official media reported.

Junk-food starved Gazans can now order Kentucky Fried Chicken to go thanks to a new smuggling service which brings takeout from Egypt via a network of underground tunnels.

It's not exactly "fast" -- taking several hours to arrive, with the Palestinian delivery company behind it charging hefty prices to cover the cost of fuel and transport.

Militants in the Gaza Strip fired a projectile that hit an open field in southern Israel on Wednesday causing no damage or casualties, police told Agence France Presse.

Spokeswoman Luba Samri said it struck in the Eshkol region. A military spokeswoman could not say whether the projectile was a mortar shell or rocket.

The International Criminal Court has opened a preliminary probe into Israel's deadly raid on a Gaza-bound flotilla in 2010, the prosecutor's office said Tuesday.

"My office will be conducting a preliminary examination in order to establish whether the criteria for opening an investigation are met," Fatou Bensouda said in a statement issued from the court based in The Hague.

Turkish and Israeli officials were meeting in Jerusalem on Monday for another round of talks over compensation for the Jewish state's deadly 2010 raid on a Gaza-bound flotilla, an Israeli official told AFP.

Foreign ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said the negotiations started at midday (0900 GMT) at the ministry's Jerusalem headquarters, although they were being run by officials from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's bureau.

An Israeli air strike on Gaza City killed one person Tuesday, Palestinian officials said, with Israel saying it targeted a militant involved in a rocket attack on its Red Sea resort of Eilat.

The military said the target was a "global jihad terrorist" linked to the April 17 rocket attack on Eilat.

An Israeli air strike on Gaza City killed one person and wounded another on Tuesday, Gaza's Hamas-run health ministry said.

"A man in his 20s was martyred and another injured in an Israeli air strike... in Shati refugee camp in western Gaza City," health ministry spokesman Ashraf al-Qudra told Agence France Presse.

Influential Muslim cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi said he will lead a delegation of clerics next week on a support visit to Hamas-ruled Gaza, a local daily reported Monday.

Qaradawi, an Egyptian who is also a citizen of Qatar and close to the Muslim Brotherhood, will travel to Gaza on May 8 along with a delegation of the Doha-based International Union of Muslim Scholars, he told Al-Arab daily.

Dozens of Palestinians held a sit-in on Sunday in central Gaza to demand the release of their Salafist relatives, held in custody by the territory's Islamist rulers Hamas.

Participants in the protest, mainly women and children, carried banners calling for their relatives to be freed.

Israeli warplanes launched three strikes early on Sunday on the Gaza Strip, targeting radical Palestinian group Islamic Jihad but causing no casualties, witnesses said.

Two air strikes hit the southern town of Khan Yunis, targeting positions of the Al-Quds Brigade, the armed wing of Islamic Jihad. The third was near the southern town of Rafah straddling the border with Egypt, the Palestinian witnesses said.