8:22am UK, Tuesday July 15, 2008

Middle East envoy Tony Blair is visiting Gaza, becoming the highest level Western official to go there since radical group Hamas took power there.

Middle East envoy Tony Blair visiting Bethlehem in the West Bank in May

Hamas officials are said to see the visit as a sign of their emergence from Western isolation.

However, the former UK prime minister has no plans to meet any Hamas leaders.

That decision is in line with a US-led boycott of the group over its refusal to recognise Israel and renounce violence after it won elections in 2006, Palestinian and Western officials said.

Mr Blair last visited the Gaza Strip in 1998 when he was prime minister.

The trip comes nearly a month after an Egyptian-brokered truce took hold in the Gaza Strip, curbing cross-border fighting between Israel and Palestinian militants.

Hamas said it was making “all the necessary security arrangements” for the visit.

Taher al Nono, spokesman for the Hamas administration in the Gaza Strip, said: “We hope that Blair’s visit will be a serious step on the way to break the siege.”

Aside from UN envoys, few Western dignitaries have visited the Gaza Strip since Hamas defeated more secular Fatah forces loyal to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and seized control in June 2007.

The Quartet of international powers – the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations – appointed Mr Blair to the envoy post a year ago with an economic focus to bolster the chances of a peace deal this year.

Most of the economic projects promoted by Mr Blair have been earmarked for the occupied West Bank, where Mr Abbas and his Western-backed government hold sway.

The former PM has, however, also included in his economic package a major sewage project for the northern Gaza Strip.

It took months of lobbying by Mr Blair and other Western officials to get Israeli permission to bring in sewage pipes, wire and other equipment.

Gazans and Western donors view the sewage project as urgent – last year, five people drowned in a wave of raw sewage from a plant in northern Gaza.

Israel had argued that equipment needed to repair the sewage system could be used to make rockets that are fired into Israel.