GAZA CITY, 28 June 2007 — Israeli forces yesterday killed over a dozen Palestinians, including a 12-year-old boy in the deadliest raid in the Gaza Strip since Hamas took control of the territory, local medics said.

The Israeli incursion came as the Middle East Quartet named Tony Blair, who stepped down as Britain’s prime minister, as their new envoy in a bid to revive Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking after Hamas’ Gaza victory.

“The absolute priority is to try to give effect to what is now the consensus across the international community — that the only way of bringing stability and peace to the Middle East is a two-state solution,” Blair told Parliament in London.

Ghazi Hamad, an aide to Ismail Haniyeh, prime minister in the Hamas-led government dismissed by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, said the movement did not expect Blair to be even-handed.

Israel’s operation in Gaza City and the southern town of Khan Younis appeared to signal it intended to keep strong military pressure on Hamas along with efforts to isolate the movement financially and politically.

Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said the Israeli incursion was part of a “conspiracy in which Abbas is a participant and which is aimed at pressuring Hamas and the people of Gaza.”

Four of the nine fighters killed in the Israeli operation belonged to Hamas, which defeated forces from Abbas’ secular Fatah faction in the territory two weeks ago.

Local residents in two Gaza battle zones said gunmen fired rocket-propelled grenades and detonated explosive devices in confrontations with Israeli infantry and armor.

A 12-year-old boy lay in the street, his arms twisted at odd angles, near a house in a Gaza City neighborhood where residents and medical workers said a shell fired by an Israeli tank exploded.

He was pronounced dead in a hospital along with two men, their bodies shredded by shrapnel. Residents said the men were civilians.

Commenting on the raid, Abbas told reporters: “We strongly condemn these criminal acts, either in Gaza or the West Bank. We are against violence in all its forms and also we are against launching rockets (at Israel).”

— With input from agencies