Israel Has First Suicide Bombing In A Year

DIMONA, Israel – A suicide bomber blew himself up Monday at a shopping center in the southern town that houses Israel’s secretive nuclear reactor complex, killing an Israeli woman and wounding nine. Police said they killed a second attacker before he could detonate his explosives belt.

It was the first suicide attack in Israel in a year, and officials were investigating whether the attackers came in through Egypt after Palestinian militants breached the Gaza-Egypt border last month.

An offshoot of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah movement claimed responsibility for the attack, complicating recently revived peace talks. Militants said other attackers were already inside Israel, poised to carry out further assaults.

Abbas, whose government is based in the West Bank, condemned the attack on Dimona. But in the Gaza Strip, gunmen fired in the air and mourners passed out sweets to celebrate the bombing.

Hours after the bombing, Israeli aircraft struck a car in northern Gaza, killing a top wanted militant.

Israeli government officials dismissed the notion that the heavily guarded Dimona nuclear reactor was the suicide attackers’ target. The explosion took place in a shopping area about six miles from the reactor site.

Dimona is home to Israel’s nuclear research center, and it is widely believed atomic weapons were developed at the plant. Israel neither admits nor denies having nuclear arms.

Ambulances and a large contingent of soldiers, rescue workers and police rushed to the scene of the bombing, the first in the working class town of 37,000.

One attacker managed to detonate his explosives belt, but the second was injured by the blast before he could set off his bomb. TV footage showed officers shooting the second attacker dead as he lay on the pavement. The severed head of the successful bomber lay in a pool of blood next to his shot comrade.

Dr. Michael Sherf, director of Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba, where the wounded were treated, said the bomb was packed with ball bearings, making the impact more potent.

David Dahan, a 58-year-old man disabled by a hip injury, had just finished his morning cup of coffee at a cafe when the blast went off about six feet away.

“There was a great explosion and a great ball of fire came toward me,” said Dahan, who uses a walker. “I saw him (the bomber) fall. I was hit, but I held on to my walker. … My clothes were covered with his flesh.”

Dahan’s eye was covered with bloody bandages, and ball bearings were lodged inside his chest and the swollen left side of his face. He also had wounds in a leg and arm.

Dr. Baruch Mandelzweig said he was at his nearby clinic when he heard the blast. He and his nurses rushed out and saw body parts “strewn around everywhere.”

They spotted a critically wounded man and began to treat him before realizing he was the second attacker. “We saw an explosive belt,” Mandelzweig said. “We ran away.”

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said the attack “presents an additional painful reminder that we have to stay alert at all times and on all fronts.”

“There is a war between us and the terror groups that continues uninterrupted, an ongoing, relentless war. We shall hit all those involved in terrorism and anyone who tries to harm Israeli citizens,” Olmert told a meeting of his Kadima Party.

Shortly after the bombing, Israeli aircraft killed a senior commander in the Hamas-affiliated Popular Resistance Committees in the Gaza Strip, the militant group said. The military confirmed an attack on a PRC activist in Beit Lahiya, a town used by Palestinian extremists to fire rockets into southern Israel.

Southern Israel has been on alert against militant attacks since the Gaza Strip’s Islamic Hamas rulers breached the territory’s walled-off border with Egypt on Jan. 23, allowing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to cross into Egypt unchecked over 12 days.

Egypt managed to reseal the border only on Sunday. Egyptian officials had no immediate comment on the Dimona bombing.

Gunfire erupted at the Gaza-Egypt border Monday and one Palestinian was killed and six were wounded after stone-throwing clashes between Egyptian border guards and Palestinians, witnesses said. Egyptian authorities said more than a dozen of their troops were wounded.

At Sunday’s Cabinet meeting, Israeli security chiefs warned that because of the anarchy on the Gaza-Egypt frontier, Palestinian militants might have been able to slip into Egypt and cross the 155-mile mostly unfenced border between the Sinai desert and Israel to attack a civilian Israeli target, officials said.

Dimona, in Israel’s Negev desert, is about 40 miles northeast of the border with Egypt.

Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said police were investigating two possibilities – that the attackers penetrated Israel from Egypt after the border breach or entered directly from one of the two Palestinian territories.

In a telephone interview, Abu Fouad, a spokesman for the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, a violent Fatah offshoot, said the two attackers sneaked into Egypt after the border breach, then crossed into Israel using unspecified “private contacts.” He said Dimona was chosen because it had never been attacked before. He did not mention the reactor.

He claimed the group had more militants inside Israel waiting to strike.

“They will go on a signal,” he said.

Yellow Fatah flags flew outside the Gaza City home of one of the attackers, 22-year-old Luay Laghwani, and Al Aqsa gunmen fired in the air in tribute. His sobbing mother, Ibtissam, held up a picture of him as a young teenager, while male relatives scolded her for crying, saying she should be proud of her son.

She said her son had gone to Egypt three times after the border was breached and she last saw him on Wednesday. He gave no indication he was about to embark on a suicide mission, she said.

The bombing came at a critical juncture in peace efforts. Israeli and Palestinian negotiators relaunched peace talks after a seven-year break just two months ago, and Israel has made clear it won’t implement any accord until militant groups in the West Bank and Hamas-ruled Gaza are disarmed.

Abbas’ office denounced the attack. It denied Al Aqsa was involved and linked the bombing to an Israeli raid in the West Bank that killed two Islamic Jihad militants before dawn Monday.

“The Palestinian Authority expresses its full condemnation of the Israeli operation in the northern West Bank and it condemns the attack in the commercial center in the city of Dimona, which targeted Israeli civilians,” his office said.

The previous suicide bombing in Israel occurred Jan. 29, 2007, when a Palestinian attacker entered Israel from Egypt, killing three Israelis at a bakery in the southern Israeli city of Eilat.

By YANIV ZOHAR, Associated Press Writer

Associated Press writer Diaa Hadid in Gaza City, Gaza Strip, contributed to this report.