Suicide bombing in Israel is first in a year

A Palestinian blew himself up today in a desert town near Israel’s nuclear reactor, killing a woman and wounding 10 people in the first suicide attack in Israel in just over a year.

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

It was the latest violence to sour the climate for U.S.-backed peace talks, which were revived in December after a seven-year hiatus with the aim of creating an independent Palestinian state by the end of President Bush’s term.

The bombing followed stepped-up Israeli army raids against rocket-firing militants in the Hamas-governed Gaza Strip, the tightening of an Israeli blockade there and Hamas’ Jan. 23 demolition of a border wall that allowed hundreds of thousands of Gazans to enter Egypt freely for 11 days.

Speaking in parliament, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said today that Israel would continue peace talks with the Palestinian Authority, and he warned that the army would strike hard against militants trying to derail them.

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

Israeli officials said the heavily guarded nuclear reactor did not appear to be the target of today’s bombing. It is surrounded by a tall barbed-wire fence and located more than a mile from Dimona on a road closed to the public.

Conflicting claims of responsibility for the attack left it unclear where the assailants 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 infiltrated 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 videotaped farewell message from the two Gaza men. Relatives confirmed that both had left for Egypt last week.

Aghawani, a member of the Al Aqsa group, said on the videotape 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.

News of Al Aqsa’s claim reinforced Israelis’ fears that large numbers of Gaza militants had poured through the border breach, which was finally 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, an Al Aqsa spokesman, claimed the group had more militants in Israel waiting to strike.

Hours later, however, Reuters news service quoted an unnamed official of Hamas’ armed wing as saying that it had carried out the 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 television cast doubt on Al Aqsa’s claim by showing video of the second Dimona assailant before he was shot and noting 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 in fact was responsible, it would be the group’s first known suicide attack in Israel since 2004. Since then Hamas, which advocates Israel’s destruction, has taken control of Gaza and allowed the territory to be used as a launch pad for near-daily rocket attacks against nearby Israeli communities.

boudreaux@latimes.com