Live blog: Gaza under attack

A security official in Gaza has said Hamas executed 11 suspected informants for Israel, according to the Associated Press.

The official said the 11 people were killed early on Friday at Gaza's police headquarters and that they had been previously sentenced by local courts. 

He spoke on condition of anonymity due to not being authorisied to publicly discuss the incident.

The Israeli army detained a Palestinian parliamentarian in Hebron on Friday, according to local media.

Ma'an News reported that Ahmad Moussa al-Zaarir, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, was arrested after Israeli forces searched his home in al-Samu.

The news site said that as of July 34 Palestinian MPs were held by Israel, including 23 who had been detained in a campaign of arrests following the disappearance of three teenage Israeli settlers in the West Bank.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is reported to have angrily confronted Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal in Qatar yesterday.

A senior Palestinian source told the Times of Israel that the two had a "difficult" conversation in Doha.

"The source says that Abbas castigated Hamas to Mashaal and called his people “liars,” after the Shin Bet said that captured Hamas operatives had confessed to a plot to attack PA forces in the West Bank and even stage a “coup” there," the paper reported, adding that "Abbas also informed Mashaal that Hamas would have to choose between unity with Abbas’s Fatah movement and a permanent “divorce"."

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Palestine section, has released a report that said 1,000 children in Gaza will have a lifelong disability as a result of the Israeli assault on the coastal enclave.

They also reported that 140 families have lost at three relatives in individual attacks, involving 735 deaths.

The UN agency is now hosting more than 435,000 people, out of Gaza's 1.7mn population, at its facilities.

On Thursday the funeral of three prominent Hamas commanders took place, after Israel carried out an assasination attack the previous day. 

Mohammed Abu Shamala, Mohammed Barhoum and Raed al-Attar died in the attack near Rafah, which Gaza officials said killed at least 10 people.

The deputy foreign minister of Israel has speculated that Qassam Brigades' leader Mohammed Deif is dead, after an assasination attack earlier in the week left his wife and daughter dead.

“My assessment is that he isn’t alive, because i don’t see any indication that he emerged from the debris [of his bombed house] alive,” Tzachi Hanegbi told Israel Radio.

Hanegbi accepted that currently it's still "a matter of guessing," and that Deif, who has survived multiple assasination attempts in the past, "has many lives."

Two Palestinians were killed in Israeli shelling in the central Gaza Strip on Friday, a Health Ministry spokesman said.

"The two were killed in the shelling that targeted an animal farm in the central Gaza Strip," Ashraf al-Qodra told Anadolu Agency.

According to eyewitnesses, the Israeli attack caused heavy damage to the farm and nearby houses.

The latest fatalities bring to 2,088 the number of Palestinians killed in relentless Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip since July 7.

Al-Qodra said the fatalities included 561 children, 255 women and 98 elders.

The deputy head of the political office of Palestinian faction Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, said late on Thursday that his movement becomes stronger by the assassination of its leaders.

"We assure everybody that we will continue to move ahead, even with the pains we feel at the absence of our leaders in the field," Haniyeh said.

"The history of our movement had proved that it becomes stronger after the assassination of its leaders," he added in a statement.