GAZA (AFP) -- Israeli artillery fire killed one Palestinian and wounded five others Sunday in the Gaza Strip, Hamas said, hours after three Israeli soldiers were injured by a mortar.

Bassam al-Helou, 29, a member of the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, was killed when Israeli forces opened fire on an area on the edge of Gaza city, the Islamist movement said in a statement.
A medical source confirmed the death.
According to Hamas, five other members of the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades were injured by the artillery rounds.
The Israeli military confirmed that it had fired on suspected militants.
""Our soldiers spotted suspicious silhouettes approaching the security barrier (which separates the Gaza Strip from Israel) and opened fire,"" an Israeli military spokeswoman told AFP.
Earlier on Sunday, a mortar round fired from the Gaza Strip hurt three Israeli soldiers, the military said.
""Three soldiers were lightly wounded in the sector of Kibbutz Nahal Oz by a mortar round fired from the Gaza Strip,"" the spokeswoman said.
Public radio said southern Israel came under repeated salvos of mortar fire from Gaza during the day.
The Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades said they fired 34 mortar rounds.
Hamas' military wing also said it hit and damaged Sunday an Israeli patrol boat off the coast of Gaza with a rocket-propelled grenade, but the Israeli military said it could not confirm the attack.
Defense Minister Ehud Barak said he had authorized the army to target militant structures across the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip as Israel mulled a broad military incursion into the territory.
""The defense minister has recently authorized the army to expand its operations in response to the Hamas fire to include targeting manned Hamas military positions,"" Barak's office quoted him as telling a cabinet meeting.
Israel has in recent months carried out strikes against rocket-launching cells and infrastructure, but has refrained from targeting Hamas military headquarters since the Islamist movement seized control of Gaza last June, a senior security source told AFP.
Before Hamas announced the latest death, 18 Palestinians had been killed in Israeli air and ground operations across Gaza over the past week, marking a sharp escalation in the violence.
Some 5,953 people have been killed in Israeli-Palestinian violence since the start of the second Palestinian uprising in September 2000, the vast majority of them Palestinians, according to an AFP tally.