GAZA CITY (AFP) -- An Israeli air strike killed the Hamas military commander for the Gaza-Egypt border town of Rafah on Friday, the latest in a spate of deadly raids on the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.

Mohammed Harb was killed along with one of his lieutenants when an Israeli missile struck their car, medical sources said.
During Thursday night, two other members of the military wing of the Islamic Resistance movement which controls Gaza were also killed when two Israeli missiles slammed into their jeep.
Over the past 10 days, Israel has killed 45 Palestinians, most of them militants, in ground and air attacks on Gaza.
Harb commanded Hamas forces in the divided Egyptian frontier town of Rafah where militants blew up sections of the border fence on Tuesday night allowing hundreds of thousands of Gazans to pour across over the past few days.
The action enabled the territory’s 1.5 million inhabitants to stock up on basic supplies in defiance of a complete lockdown imposed by the Israeli defense ministry last week.
In the West Bank, an 18-year-old Palestinian was shot dead by Israeli troops that had entered the village of Beit Omar to search the houses of two fighters that were killed on Thursday as they attacked a Jewish settlement south of Jerusalem, witnesses said.
An army spokesman told AFP that troops had opened fire after a group of Palestinians refused to disperse.
Palestinian security sources named the two activists killed as they attacked the West Bank settlement as Mohammed Sabarneh, 21, and his cousin Mahmud Sabarneh, 20, from Beit Ommar, near the flashpoint city of Hebron.
Both were members of the Hamas movement which controls Gaza, the sources said. They had recently been released by Israel after two years in detention.
The latest deaths bring to 6,103 the number of people killed in Israeli-Palestinian violence since 2000, the vast majority of them Palestinians, according to an AFP toll.