(Updates death toll, adds Israeli, Hamas comment)

By Nidal al-Mughrabi

GAZA, Jan 15 (Reuters) - Israeli forces killed 10 Palestinians, eight of them armed, during raids in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday and a Palestinian sniper shot dead a foreign worker from Ecuador on an Israeli farm bordering the territory.

The violence, four days after U.S. President George W. Bush ended a peace mission to Israel and the occupied West Bank, was the deadliest in months in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. Israel said it had acted to curb cross-border rocket fire.

"This is one of the results of the Bush visit. He encouraged the Israelis to kill our people," said Mahmoud al-Zahar, a Hamas leader, as he viewed in a Gaza hospital the body of his son, a militant killed in the latest fighting.

Hamas Islamists oppose U.S.-encouraged peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Bush predicted during his three-day visit that a peace treaty would be signed before he left office in January 2009, despite deep public scepticism.

Local medical workers and Hamas said 10 Palestinians, eight of them carrying weapons, were killed in clashes with Israeli forces in the northern Gaza Strip and east of Gaza City.

At Kibbutz Ein Hashlosha, adjacent to the Gaza Strip, a foreign labourer working in a field near the Israeli-built border fence was shot dead by a Palestinian sniper, the community's security chief told Israel Radio.

Haim Yellin, head of the local Israeli regional council, identified the worker as a 20-year-old from Quito, Ecuador. Hamas's armed wing claimed responsibility for killing him.

Israel, which pulled troops and settlers out of the Gaza Strip in 2005, frequently mounts operations against militants in the territory in an effort to halt rocket attacks disrupting life in border communities.

"No society can sit by idly and see its civilian population continually targeted in this manner," Mark Regev, a spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, said about the rocket launchings. "Israel is acting to protect its citizens."

ARMOURED PUSH

Residents of Gaza City's Zeitun neighbourhood, a Hamas stronghold, said about 10 tanks and armoured vehicles had moved into the area.

At least 30 Palestinians were wounded, two critically, in Tuesday's fighting, hospital workers said. Gaza's Shifa hospital issued an appeal for blood donations.

"We will pursue the path of liberation, complete liberation, even if all of us are killed," Zahar, who lost another son in 2004 when Israel tried to assassinate him, told reporters. "We will respond to them in the language they understand."

The United States and Israel have moved to isolate Hamas over its refusal to recognise Israel, renounce violence and accept existing Israeli-Palestinian interim peace deals. (Additional reporting by Ori Lewis in Jerusalem; Writing by Jeffrey Heller in Jerusalem; Editing by Charles Dick)

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