A senior officer in Israel's northern command on Monday dismissed an Iranian claim they were in possession of data transmitted by an unmanned Hizbullah drone that overflew Israel earlier this month.

"I don't think there was a camera," he said, speaking on condition of anonymity, although he admitted the incident was "still being investigated."

Israel has turned back dozens of African asylum-seekers, mostly Eritreans, trying enter the country from Egypt, Human Rights Watch and two other NGOs said on Sunday.

"Since June, Israeli forces patrolling Israel's newly constructed ... border fence with Egypt's Sinai region have denied entry to dozens of Africans, mostly Eritreans," HRW and Israeli NGOs the Hotline for Migrant Workers and Physicians for Human Rights said in a joint statement.

Gaza fighters on Monday fired 18 rockets at southern Israel, ending several days of calm, with the armed wing of the ruling Hamas movement saying it was revenge after an air raid killed one of their men.

It was the second straight day in which fighters had fired rockets at Israel in a confrontation which began early on Sunday, and effectively ended three days of calm after an Egyptian-brokered truce went into force at midnight on Wednesday.

The murder of former premier Yitzhak Rabin by a rightwing extremist was "one of the worst crimes," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday as Israel marked the 17th anniversary of his assassination.

"The murder of Yitzhak Rabin was one of the worst crimes of the new age," Netanyahu told ministers at the weekly cabinet meeting, who held a minute's silence to mark the anniversary of his murder by a Jewish extremist who opposed his concessions to the Palestinians on November 4, 1995.

Three rockets fired from the Gaza Strip landed in southern Israel early Sunday without causing any casualties, Israeli police said, hours after an Israeli air strike in the Palestinian territory.

"Two rockets fell in an uninhabited sector of the Eshkol district and another near Beersheba. There were no injuries or damage," police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told AFP.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and ultra-nationalist Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman have agreed to join forces for a general election in the new year, boosting the premier's position as favorite.

Netanyahu and Lieberman said Thursday they will present a joint list for the January 22 election without merging their respective parties, Likud and Yisrael Beitenu.

A militant died on Thursday of wounds sustained in an Israeli raid a day earlier as calm returned to the skies over Gaza after a truce took hold, ending 72 hours of bloodshed.

As Gaza began preparing for Eid al-Adha, which starts Friday, medical sources said 24-year-old Ahmed Hrzalla, a militant with the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) who was severely wounded in an air strike in Rafah, died of his injuries.

The bomber who blew up an Israeli tourist bus in Bulgaria in July, killing six people, had up to five foreign helpers locally and the attack was planned abroad, the interior minister said Thursday.

"The number of people who participated on Bulgarian territory is between three and five," Tsvetan Tsvetanov told the 24 Hours newspaper.

Sudan is a "dangerous terrorist state," a top Israeli defense official said on Thursday after the Sudanese government accused Israel of carrying out a deadly missile strike on a military factory in Khartoum.

Sudanese officials say the attack on the Yarmouk facility south of Khartoum, which took place at around midnight on Tuesday and killed two people, was carried out by four radar-evading aircraft.

The skies over Gaza were quiet early Thursday as an Egyptian-brokered truce between Israel and Hamas took hold after a spurt of violence left four Palestinians dead and two Thai workers wounded in Israel.

"There has been no rocket fire at Israel nor any Israeli attacks in the Gaza Strip since Wednesday night," a spokeswoman for the Israeli military told AFP.