GAZA, Nov 21 (Reuters) - Gunmen abducted two Italians working for the International Committee of the Red Cross in the southern Gaza Strip on Tuesday, Palestinian officials and a spokesman for the organisation said.

A Palestinian security source said the aid workers were in a car on their way to the town of Khan Younis when they were intercepted by gunmen.

An ICRC spokesman in Jerusalem, Simon Schorno, identified the men as Claudio Moroni and Ginmarco Onorato.

"The ICRC confirms that two Italian Red Cross representatives were kidnapped by unknown persons in Khan Younis this afternoon," Schorno said.

The kidnapping was the latest in a spate of abductions of foreign aid workers and journalists in Gaza in recent months. All have been released unharmed, usually within hours.

It came hours after Palestinian militants fired rockets into an Israeli town during a visit by the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, critically wounding one person, witnesses and ambulance workers said.

Commissioner Louise Arbour, on a tour of the Palestinian territories and Israel, was unhurt in the attack in Sderot, where each salvo increases right-wing pressure on Prime Minister Ehud Olmert for more powerful military operations in Gaza.

"They (the rockets) landed a few hundred yards away from where we were," said Christopher Gunness, a U.N. spokesman who accompanied Arbour on the visit to the town, which is often targeted by militants in Gaza.

"She was in a car but the delegation had parked very briefly when we heard very loud explosions. There were two plumes of smoke," he said.

The Magen David Adom ambulance service said a factory worker was critically wounded.

Izz el-Deen al-Qassam, the armed wing of the Palestinian militant group Hamas, said it launched the makeshift rockets at Sderot and had not known Arbour would be there.

The salvo landed after Israeli troops killed a Hamas gunman in fighting in northern Gaza, where tank shelling also wounded three other Palestinians, hospital officials said. (Additional reporting by Dean Yates in Jerusalem)

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