First Suicide Bombing in Israel in Over a Year

As one blogger describes it, Dimona is "a kind of depressing one-horse town, distinguished by high unemployment and a dearth of entertainment options, in the middle of the Negev" desert. It's a few dozen miles from the Egyptian border. At 10:30 Monday morning, local time, a suicide bomber detonated himself in a shopping center there, killing one woman and injuring 11 people. A second bomber was initially knocked out by the attack, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported, which gave survivors enough time to notice him and his belt of explosives. As he rose to detonate it, police shot him dead.

The last Israeli civilian to be killed in a Palestinian attack was 29 year-old resident of an Israeli settlement near Nablus in the West Bank on Nov. 19, 2007, by gunfire while riding in his car. The last Israeli killed in Israel proper was a 35-year-old man killed in Siderot, near Gaza, when a rocket fired from Gaza landed near his car. The last suicide bombing to claim the life of an Israeli in Israel dates back to Jan. 29, 2007, when a 26-year-old resident of Eilat, the Israeli resort town on the Red Sea, was killed. The significance of the latest attack is three-fold:

• It's the first suicide attack in Israel in over a year, perhaps signaling the end of the truce in suicide bombings Palestinians declared in late 2006.
• According to Israeli authorities, the bombers entered Israel through the Egyptian border with Israel, after slipping out of Gaza when Hamas forces demolished a portion of the separation wall between Gaza and Egypt last month.
• The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a militant arm of al-Fatah, the Palestinian organization once led by Yasser Arafat, claimed responsibility for the bombing. That's significant because most of the bombings had previously been claimed by Hamas, a Fatah rival. Israel's Channel 2 reported that Fatah claimed 2008 would be a year of suicide bombings.

B'Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, maintains an excellent, comprehensive database of Palestinian and Israeli casualties of bombings, attacks and other violence in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

See also:

• Israel's Separation Barrier in the West Bank