GAZA CITY, May 1: The Israeli army killed 12 Palestinians, including a two-year-old child and its target, a wanted Hamas militant chief, on Thursday in a huge raid on Gaza City, the day after the release of a new peace plan.

Hamas leader Yusef Abu Hin, 38, and his brothers Ayman, 30, and Mahmud, 29, also members of the hardline faction, died when troops dynamited the four-storey building where they had held out for 15 hours under the fire of Israeli tanks, infantry and helicopter gunships which killed nine other people.

The dead in the battle which started before dawn included a two-year-old boy, a teenager and at least two other Hamas fighters.

Seven Israeli soldiers were wounded in the assault, which dealt a heavy blow to peace hopes that had arisen the day before when international diplomats finally unveiled a long-awaited “roadmap” to ending the 31-month conflict.

The army, which invaded Gaza City’s densely populated Shajaiya district with 60 tanks and armoured vehicles, finally succeeded in evacuating dozens of other terrified people from the building before blowing it up.

The army then pulled out, Palestinian security sources said.

Earlier, two other Palestinian men were killed south of Al Khalil in the West Bank during a night operation by the army searching for suspected militants.

Hamas, together with an armed offshoot of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction, claimed joint responsibility for a suicide bombing at a Tel Aviv bar early Wednesday which killed three people.

Israeli police said the bomber was a British citizen of Arab or Pakistani origin who had reached the crowded seafront bar from Gaza. Police were seeking another Briton who escaped after his explosives failed to detonate.

Israeli officials said they were looking into a possible link with the Al Qaeda network.

The Gaza raid was launched hours after US, UN, EU and Russian diplomats handed copies of the “roadmap” to new Palestinian prime minister Mahmud Abbas.

The plan is aimed at achieving peaceful coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians and a separate Palestinian state by 2005, through an end to violence, an Israeli pullback from Palestinian territories and a freeze on Jewish settlements.

Radical groups, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which want no accommodation with Israel, have rejected the roadmap, while chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat accused the Israelis of trying to derail the peace plan at its inception.—AFP