An Israeli woman was killed on Monday in a suicide bombing claimed by Palestinian militants at a shopping centre in the desert town of Dimona, the first such attack in a year.
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 AFP 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 Mahmud Abbas's 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's 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.