Middle East:A Palestinian suicide bomber from the Gaza Strip killed a woman in southern Israel yesterday, 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 an accomplice, 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 Islamists opposed to Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas's peace talks with the Jewish state.
Witness Rosa Enberg told Israel's Channel Two television: "It was like a war. People were running like crazy. I saw a piece of a human being right there, next to my leg."
Israel's Dimona nuclear reactor, which is widely believed to have produced atomic bombs, is located in a heavily guarded compound on the outskirts of the town.
- (Reuters)