Hamas on Tuesday closed the offices of Gaza's only mobile telephone company after accusing it of tax-dodging, a move experts said could halt all cellular services in the Palestinian territory.

Police in the Gaza Strip, which Hamas controls, shut the offices of Palestinian telecoms provider Jawwal in Gaza City and left notices proclaiming it was "on the orders of the (Hamas) public prosecutor", an AFP correspondent said.

Israel snubbed a United Nations Human Rights Council session Monday debating a scathing report detailing likely war crimes committed during last year's Gaza war, with Israel's ambassador slamming the body as "morally flawed."

"I am out here and not in there because the Human Rights Council has abandoned fairness, has become morally flawed and has entirely politicized its concern for universal human rights," Israel's representative to the council Eviatar Manor told reporters outside the council chambers at the U.N. in Geneva.

Israel's navy on Monday halted a flotilla seeking to defy its Gaza blockade without the deadly force that marred a similar attempt in 2010 and escorted one vessel to port.

Among the passengers on the commandeered ship were Tunisia's former president Moncef Marzouki and Arab-Israeli lawmaker Basel Ghattas.

Israel on Thursday released a prominent Hamas leader in the West Bank, the Islamist group said, a year after his arrest along with hundreds of others following the killing of three Israeli teenagers.

Hamas says Hassan Yusef, who has spent years in Israeli jails and was elected to the Palestinian parliament in 2006 while in Israeli custody, has worked entirely in the political wing of the movement.

A drone launched from the Gaza Strip crashed inside Israel on Thursday, the Israeli military said, the third such incursion in just under a year, with previous incidents claimed by Hamas.

"Some kind of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) was spotted entering Israeli airspace from the Strip," an army spokeswoman told AFP.

U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon urged Israel on Wednesday to ease restrictions on travel for Palestinians between the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank for Ramadan prayers.

Israel has eased restrictions on Palestinians seeking to enter Jerusalem for Friday prayers at Al-Aqsa mosque, Islam's third-holiest site, for Ramadan.

The rebuilding of thousands of homes destroyed in last summer's Gaza war is to begin in the coming days, almost a year after the conflict began, the Palestinian housing minister said Wednesday.

The July-August war in the besieged Gaza Strip destroyed or partially damaged tens of thousands of homes, leaving 100,000 Gazans homeless.

Israel said Wednesday it was revoking permits for 500 Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to enter Jerusalem ahead of Friday prayers because of rocket fire from the Palestinian enclave.

A spokeswoman for COGAT, the defense ministry unit which coordinates with Gaza, told AFP the move to cancel part of its measures easing restrictions on Palestinians during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan applied to this week only and was "because of the rocket" which hit southern Israel on Tuesday night, causing no injuries.

Egypt opened the Rafah border crossing with the Gaza Strip Tuesday, a Palestinian official said, allowing the delivery of cement supplies into the badly destroyed territory.

The move, which also allowed Palestinians to leave and enter Gaza, came almost a year after the outbreak of a bloody and destructive 50-day war between Israel and militant organization Hamas, with tens of thousands of homes still in ruins.

Activists aboard a flotilla of boats are to soon set sail for Gaza in a fresh bid to break Israel's blockade of the territory, five years after a similar attempt ended in a deadly raid.

The so-called Freedom Flotilla III -- a convoy of ships carrying pro-Palestinian activists, at least one European lawmaker and an Arab-Israeli MP -- will try to reach the shores of the Gaza Strip by the end of the month.