RAMALLAH/GAZA CITY, 5 February 2008 — An Israeli woman was killed yesterday in a suicide bombing claimed by Palestinian militants at a shopping center in the desert town of Dimona, the first such attack in a year. Earlier in the day, Israeli forces killed two Islamic Jihad members in the West Bank town of Qabatyah, near Jenin. Palestinians reported that another gunman was critically injured by Israeli fire in the same incident.

The Israeli sources said that a police officer who was in the area shot and killed another attacker. The blast in Dimona, near the site of Israel’s top secret nuclear reactor, was the first suicide bombing on Israeli soil since the relaunch of peace talks at a US conference in November and triggered scenes of panic in the town.

“At 10:30 this morning (0830 GMT) two suicide bombers arrived at the mall,” police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told reporters at the scene. “One succeeded to blow himself up, the other one was shot and killed by a police officer.”

One Israeli woman was killed and 11 people were wounded in the blast in the open-air shopping mall, medics said. The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a militant group loosely linked to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ secular Fatah party, claimed joint responsibility for the attack along with two other groups.

It was the first suicide attack in Israel since January last year when a suicide bomber blew himself up in a bakery in the Red Sea resort of Eilat, killing three people.

Abbas’ Palestinian Authority condemned the attack but also lashed out at an Israeli military operation earlier in the day that killed two militants in the north of the occupied West Bank. The Islamist Hamas movement, which rules the Gaza Strip called the bombing a “heroic act” and a “natural response to occupation crimes.”

Just hours after the bombers struck Israel launched an air raid in northern Gaza, killing a senior Palestinian militant, medics and witnesses said.

Israel, which has been battling to stop rocket fire from the Gaza Strip, vowed to continue to “fight terrorism by all necessary means,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Arye Mekel told reporters.

President Shimon Peres slammed “the despicable terrorists who want to murder innocent women and children and nip in the bud any chances of peace.”

The attack came after a near two-week breach of the border between Egypt and Gaza, which saw hundreds of thousands of people pouring into Egypt from the impoverished Hamas-run territory in a bid to break a crippling Israeli siege.

A spokesman for the Al-Aqsa Brigades told reporters the Dimona bombers were from Gaza, while a statement from the group said they had left for their mission from Ramallah in the occupied West Bank.

Before yesterday the last suicide attack inside Israel was in January last year in the resort town of Eilat, and was claimed jointly by the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades and Islamic Jihad.

Dimona is the site of Israel’s Negev Nuclear Research Center, the top secret desert facility where Israel is widely believed to have developed the Middle East’s sole if undeclared nuclear arsenal.

—With input from agencies