Suicide bomber kills woman in southern Israel town

By Yehuda Peretz

DIMONA, Israel (Reuters) - 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 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 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.

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, one of the bombers, 20-year-old Loai al-Aghwani, from Gaza City, said in his videotape he hoped his actions 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".