A Thai worker has been killed by a Palestinian rocket attack in southern Israel, an emergency service source said.

Local media said the man was a 30-year-old farm worker from Thailand employed in an agricultural community just north of Gaza.

The attack occurred on the same day as EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton visited the Gaza Strip, the first such trip by a senior official in over a year.

Baroness Ashton was due to fly to Moscow later in the day for a meeting of the Quartet of Middle East mediators involving Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

One of the main topics for discussion may be Israel's announcement last week that it had given the go-ahead for the building of 1,600 houses for Jewish families in the disputed area of East Jerusalem. The news threatened to derail the agreed resumption of peace talks, with the Palestinian side saying it would pull out unless the building plans were abandoned.

Settlement construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, both occupied by Israel since the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, has been the main obstacle to reviving peace talks.

Under the internationally agreed roadmap for Middle East peace, Israel is obliged to freeze all settlement construction activity and remove unauthorized outposts built since 2001 from Palestinian territories.

TEL AVIV/ GAZA, March 18 (RIA Novosti)