Tel Aviv/Gaza - For a second day in a row, Israeli warplanes struck at suspected smuggling tunnels on the Gaza Strip border with Egypt on Saturday.

An Israeli military spokesman said three tunnels were bombed in the action, coming after Palestinian militants had fired three mortar rounds against Israeli territory. The mortars caused no damage.

Earlier, the military wing of the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) claimed responsibility for the mortar attack.

In Egypt, witnesses told the German Press Agency dpa that the airstrikes caused damage on the Egyptian side of the border, with walls collapsing and glass being shattered by the impact of what were said to be special bombs targeting the tunnels.

Residents near the border fled to Arish in the northern Sinai Peninsula, the eyewitnesses said.

Egypt has meanwhile intensified its security along the border, fearing a breach by the Palestinians.

The Israeli military spokesman did not confirm earlier Palestinian accounts from Gaza that Israeli soldiers had opened fire on farmers near the the security fence in the south-eastern part of the strip.

Eyewitnesses had said the farmers were working their land in the Faraheen area in the east of Khan Younis city when they came under machine gun fire from the Israeli army posts on the border.

According to security sources, another machine gun was fired from the border along in the north-east Gaza Strip, east of the town of Jabaliya.

There were no casualties in the two shooting incidents.

Meanwhile, three Israeli bulldozers, backed by two tanks, rolled for a few hundreds of meters into Beit Lahiya town, an agricultural community in the northern Gaza Strip. Residents said the bulldozers leveled some groves and withdrew later in the morning.

The tensions come a week before the visit of Pope Benedict XVI to the Holy Land.

In late December 2008, Israel launched the toughest offensive yet in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, killing more than 1,300 Palestinians and destroying thousands of houses and Hamas-run governmental buildings in retaliation against a series of rocket attacks against Israel by Palestinian militants.

Since the end of the Israeli offensive on January 18, Palestinian militants have fired more than 190 rockets and mortars from the Gaza Strip against Israel, by Israeli accounts.

In political developments, the Islamic Palestinian Hamas movement on Saturday denied the resumption of Egypt's efforts to broker a ceasefire between Israel and militant groups in the Gaza Strip.

"There is nothing new regarding the lull," said Fawzi Barhoum, a spokesman for Hamas, which controls Gaza.

His comments followed reports that Egypt had asked the Palestinian factions to study the possibility of reaching a new ceasefire with Israel.

In June 2008, Egypt brokered a six-month truce between the Palestinian militant groups and Israel in the Gaza Strip. Egypt has been hosting reconciliation talks between Hamas and its rival Fatah. (dpa)