Suicide bomber kills 1 in Israel

A Palestinian blew himself up Monday in an Israeli town near the Egyptian border, killing a woman and wounding 10 other people in the first suicide attack in Israel in just over a year.

Police prevented a second blast at the same strip mall in the southern desert town of Dimona by fatally shooting another attacker as he reached for his explosives-laden belt.

The violence was the latest to sour the climate for U.S.-backed peace talks since they were revived in December after a seven-year hiatus. It followed stepped-up Israeli army raids against rocket-firing militants in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, the tightening of an Israeli blockade there, and Hamas’ demolition of a border wall that allowed hundreds of thousands of Gazans to pour into Egypt for 11 days.

Speaking in parliament after the blast, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Israel would continue peace talks with the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority and strike hard against militants trying to derail them.

“This war will continue,” he declared. “Terrorism will be hit. We will not relent.”

Dimona, a working-class town of 35,000 people, is home to Israel’s heavily protected nuclear reactor. But officials said it was not the target of the bombing, which occurred about six miles away.

Conflicting claims of responsibility for the attack left it unclear who sent the assailants and where they came from.

Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, an outlawed militia loosely affiliated with the legal Fatah movement of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, said the two men entered Israel after crossing from Gaza to Egypt through the breached border.

The militia identified them as Luay Aghawani, 22, and Musa Arafat, 24, and released a videotape of the two Gaza men reading farewell messages. Relatives in Gaza said both had left for Egypt last week.

Aghawani, a member of the Al Aqsa group, said on the video that he intended to die to protest Israel’s blockade of Gaza and “restore dignity to the Palestinian people.” Arafat was identified as a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which is affiliated with neither Fatah nor Hamas.

News of Al Aqsa’s claim reinforced Israelis’ fears that large numbers of Gaza militants had passed through the border breach, which was closed Sunday, and possibly entered Israel over its long, porous frontier with Egypt’s Sinai region. Dimona is about 35 miles from that border.

Abu Fouad, a spokesman for Al Aqsa in Gaza, said it had more militants inside Israel ready to strike.

Hours later, however, Reuters quoted an unnamed official of Hamas’ armed wing as saying that it had carried out Monday’s bombing and that the attackers had reached Dimona from the West Bank city of Hebron, not from the Gaza Strip.

An Israeli army spokesman said security officials were investigating both claims. Israel’s Channel 10 cast doubt on Al Aqsa’s account by showing video of the second Dimona assailant before he was shot and observing that he appeared larger and older than the two Gazans in the farewell video.

Hamas’ official spokesman, Ayman Taha, declined to comment on the Reuters report but praised the bombing as a “glorious act.” If Hamas was responsible, it would be the group’s first known suicide attack inside Israel since 2004 and would signal a major escalation of the conflict.

Hamas, which advocates Israel’s destruction, has taken control of Gaza from Abbas’ movement and allowed the territory to be used as a launch pad for near-daily rocket attacks against nearby Israeli communities.

Whoever carried it out, Monday’s attack reinforced doubts over Abbas’ capacity to silence militants’ weapons as he negotiates with Israel over the borders of a future Palestinian state, the status of refugees and a possible division of Jerusalem.

Abbas condemned the bombing, and Al Aqsa’s West Bank leaders denied any involvement. But the videotape issued in Gaza indicated that his followers are splintered and beyond his control.

Monday’s blast sprayed ball bearings from the bomber’s belt and pieces of his body in all directions. Clothing from a shattered store flew onto the sidewalk as bloodied pedestrians scattered.

The bomber’s severed head came to rest near his companion, who was felled by the blast.

Baruch Mandelzweig, an Israeli doctor, ventured from a nearby clinic with his nurses and saw the bomber’s companion bleeding from the head. As he opened the wounded man’s shirt, “we saw an explosive belt,” the doctor later told Channel 10. “We ran away.”

When police officer Kobi Mor reached the scene minutes later, the bomber was lying on the sidewalk and reaching for his belt, he told Channel 10. “I fired and his hand fell,” he said. “Two and a half minutes later he lifted his hand again, again toward the belt, and I knelt down and fired four bullets to the center of his head.”

boudreaux@latimes.com

Special correspondent Rushdi abu Alouf in Gaza City contributed to this report.