GAZA, June 7 (Reuters) - Shells fired from an Israeli tank killed a Palestinian gunman and wounded another east of Gaza City on Saturday, Hamas Islamists and local medical workers said.

Residents of the neighbourhood of Shijaia, a Hamas stronghold, said a shell hit a house where the gunman was killed and another shell was aimed directly at a gunman who was critically wounded.

Hamas said the two men belonged to their organisation.

An Israeli army spokesman said a ground force operating on the Israeli side of the border in the northern part of the Gaza Strip spotted an armed man trying to lay an explosive device near the fence and shot him.

Israel has tightened a blockade on the Gaza Strip and often conducts raids and air strikes into the territory which it says are aimed at ending frequent rocket and mortar fire at towns and agricultural communities close to the border.

On Friday, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said a major military operation into the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip to counter the cross-border rocket fire was looking more likely.

"At this moment the pendulum is swinging closer to military action in Gaza than anything else," Olmert said after returning from a three-day trip to the United States where he met President George W. Bush.

Hamas seized the Gaza Strip from the forces of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah faction a year ago in a brief but bloody civil war.

Violence along the Gaza border has marred peace talks between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Abbas, who holds sway in the West Bank. Egypt has so far failed in efforts to broker a truce to curb the rocket attacks on Israel and Israeli raids in the Gaza Strip. (Reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi; Writing by Ori Lewis; Editing by Stephen Weeks)

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