Death penalty supporters protested in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday outside a conference calling for its abolition, days after Islamist rulers Hamas hanged a convicted murderer.

Relatives of murder victims held aloft pictures of their loved ones, demanding the execution of imprisoned suspects, while human rights groups in the Palestinian territory marked World Day against the Death Penalty.

Palestinians on Tuesday held the funeral of a Gaza resident killed by the Israeli army the night before, an Agence France Presse correspondent said, in an incident human rights groups condemned.

Huwayshel Hawajira, 36, was shot dead by Israeli soldiers in the northern Gaza Strip on Monday evening, Palestinian medical sources said, and taken to a nearby hospital in Beit Hanun.

The Hamas rulers of Gaza, where an Israeli blockade worsened after a friendly government in Cairo was overthrown, is doing all it can to avoid a confrontation with Egypt's army, experts say.

In July, an army coup ousted Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, a close Hamas ally.

Israel on Sunday permitted delivery of cement and steel for use by the private sector into the Gaza Strip for the first time since 2007, a Palestinian official said.

"Israel allowed today for the first time in six years, the entry of 40 trucks filled with gravel, 20 trucks loaded with cement and 10 with steel for the private sector in Gaza" Raed Fattouh, the Palestinian official in charge of Gaza supplies, said in a statement.

A rocket fired from the Gaza Strip has hit southern Israel, the army said on Thursday, but no casualties or damage was reported.

The remains of the rocket, which was fired on Wednesday, were found early on Thursday after a search by security forces, an army statement said.

Gaza rulers Hamas and residents of the Palestinian territory fear Egypt's destruction of tunnels used to smuggle goods across the border is part of a plan to tighten a blockade of the Strip.

"The Egyptian army has destroyed 95 percent of the tunnels with the aim of setting up a security buffer zone," Sobhi Ridwan, head of the Palestinian municipality in the border town of Rafah, told AFP.

Israel is to allow limited quantities of building materials for use by the private sector into the blockaded Gaza Strip starting from Sunday, a Palestinian official said.

After "efforts exerted by the Palestinian Authority, Israel has agreed for the first time in six years for building materials such as cement, iron and gravel to be brought into Gaza from Sunday" through the Kerem Shalom goods crossing, Raed Fattouh, PA official in charge of Gaza supplies, told Agence France Presse Tuesday.

Two Egyptian army tanks crossed an initial border fence leading to Gaza for the first time on Thursday, witnesses said, but did not enter the Palestinian territory itself.

Gaza's Hamas rulers neither confirmed nor denied the incursion, but said no Egyptian tanks had entered the besieged Strip.

Egypt's military says it has seized caches of weapons in a Sinai operation including a mortar apparently belonging to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group in neighboring Gaza.

The military has launched a sweeping offensive in the north of the peninsula to quell an Islamist militant insurgency that surged after the army deposed president Mohammed Morsi in July.

Several hundred Egyptians protested Tuesday in the frontier town of Rafah against the military's demolition of homes across the border from the Palestinian Gaza Strip, witnesses and security officials said.

Troops have bulldozed at least 15 homes in the restive border town which security officials said housed entrances to tunnels used to smuggle goods into Islamist-ruled Gaza.