DIMONA, Israel—A Palestinian suicide bomber from the Gaza Strip killed a woman in southern Israel on Monday, the first such attack in the country in a year, but Israeli officials said peace talks would not be derailed.
Police said they prevented a second blast in the shopping centre of the town of Dimona by shooting dead another attacker, also a Gazan, before he could detonate an explosives belt.
One of the attackers said in a farewell video recording he wanted to strike against what he called Israel's siege of the Gaza Strip, territory controlled by Hamas terrorists opposed to President Mahmoud Abbas's peace talks with the Jewish state.
"It was like a war. People were running like crazy. I saw a piece of a human being right there, next to my leg," witness Rosa Enberg told Israel's Channel Two television.
for Israel Bombing
GAZA—Hamas's armed wing claimed responsibility for a Palestinian suicide bombing that killed a woman in southern Israel on Monday, the first such attack inside Israel claimed by Hamas since 2004, a Hamas source told Reuters.
The source said the two Palestinians who died during the attack in the Israeli town of Dimona came from the West Bank city of Hebron, rather than from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. Other details were not immediately available.
The last time Hamas's armed wing claimed responsibility for suicide bombings inside Israel was August 2004, when 16 people were killed and 100 wounded in explosions on two buses in the southern Israeli city of Beersheba.
Israel's Dimona nuclear reactor, widely believed to have produced atomic bombs, is located in a heavily guarded compound on the outskirts of the town.
A Gaza-based source in President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah faction said the "Army of Palestine" wing of Fatah's al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades launched the attack along with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
Wearing military-style fatigues and clutching an assault rifle, 20-year-old Loai al-Aghwani, from Gaza City, said in his videotape he hoped his participation in the attack would "restore dignity to the Palestinian people".
Standing in front of an al-Aqsa Brigades banner, Aghwani appealed to Abbas and Khaled Meshaal, a Hamas leader, "to end internal division".
A video broadcast later on Israeli television showed a close-up of the face of the second attacker who was shot dead after the bomb went off. The image does not resemble either of the attackers featured in the videos released in Gaza.
Israel's Channel 10 television, which aired the conflicting images side by side, said it raised questions about the identities of the bombers.
A Fatah official in the West Bank denied al-Aqsa involvement. The conflicting statements reflected divisions in Fatah as Abbas pursues U.S.-backed peace talks with Israel, the first in seven years.
"Abu Mazen (Abbas) is a moderate who wants peace. We will continue to negotiate with him," an Israeli official said.
Celebration
Two other militant groups, Islamic Jihad and Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, praised the Dimona bombing as retaliation for Israeli raids. Young supporters of Fatah handed out flowers and candy to passing cars in the Gaza city of Rafah.
Abbas condemned the Dimona bombing but also criticised an earlier military raid by Israel in the occupied West Bank.
Police said the suicide bomber blew himself up in Dimona's busy commercial centre, killing himself and the Israeli woman, who was not immediately identified.
"The second terrorist was shot in the head as he tried to set off his bomb belt," said Yossi Porianta, the police chief in Israel's southern Negev region. The Magen David Adom ambulance service said 10 people were wounded.
A Palestinian suicide bomber last struck in Israel on Jan. 29, 2007, killing three people in the southern resort town of Eilat, on the Red Sea.
Hours after Monday's bombing, an Israeli air strike in the Gaza Strip killed Amer Qarmout, a senior commander in the Popular Resistance Committees, which carries out cross-border rocket attacks. The PRC vowed revenge.
Israeli officials said the two bombers might have entered Egyptian territory after the Gaza-Egypt border was blasted open by Hamas last month, and then infiltrated into Israel through its unfenced frontier with Egypt.
Egypt has since sealed the breach. Al-Aqsa Brigades in Gaza denied Aghwani and Musa Arafat, 23, from the Gazan town of Khan Younis, reached Israel from Egypt.
But Arafat's mother said her son had telephoned her from the Egyptian town of el-Arish.
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