Hamas Claims Responsibility for Blast
JERUSALEM — Israel appeared to face a renewed and heightened threat from suicide bombings on Tuesday after the military wing of the Islamic group Hamas officially claimed responsibility for a lethal attack Monday at a shopping center in the southern Israeli town of Dimona.
The claim by Hamas's Qassam Brigades signaled a possible end to a self-imposed moratorium on such attacks by the Islamic group, which had lasted more than three years.
Hamas said that its bombers came from the West Bank city of Hebron. But there has also been speculation and concern in Israel that potential attackers may be making their way into the country from the Egyptian Sinai, having taken advantage of a recent 11-day breach of the border between Egypt and the Gaza Strip, which is under the control of Hamas.
Shortly before the claim was made public, seven Hamas policemen were killed in an Israeli air strike against a Hamas post near Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip, according to Palestinian hospital officials. Israeli soldiers killed two more Hamas militants before dawn in the south of the strip. Army officials said the soldiers shot at two suspicious figures who approached them while they were on a routine operation inside the strip.
An Israeli army spokesman said that the air strike came as a response to Qassam rockets fired from Gaza on Tuesday morning. Those rockets hit two factories in the Israeli border town of Sderot, causing some damage. After the air strike, militants from Gaza fired a barrage of rockets at Israel, hitting a house in Sderot. One resident was moderately wounded by shrapnel, and several others were lightly hurt, the spokesman said.
The Dimona attack, in which one Israeli woman was killed along with two bombers, was the first to hit Israel in a year.
The last suicide bombing claimed by Hamas was in August 2004. A smaller group, Islamic Jihad, has been behind the attacks carried out since, Israeli officials have said.
The Hamas claim came amid growing confusion in Israel and the Palestinian territories over the identity of the Dimona bombers and their dispatchers. Soon after the bombing, the Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades militia in Gaza, which is loosely affiliated with Fatah, the mainstream rival of Hamas, claimed responsibility in conjunction with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and a third unknown group.
That initial claim identified the bombers as two Gaza residents: Louai al-Aghwani, 21, a resident of Gaza City, was said by his family to have been a Fatah supporter; and Musa Arafat, 23, a Popular Front activist from a village near Khan Yunis.
There were conflicting statements from the Aksa Brigades about whether the pair had entered Israel via Egyptian territory, or directly from Gaza.
But Hamas identified the bombers as Muhammad al-Hirbawi and Shadi al-Zaghair, both from Hebron. While Israel had not revealed the results of its own investigation by Tuesday evening, officials hinted during the day that the bombers had indeed come from Hebron.
Speaking to army cadets at a base in southern Israel, the defense minister, Ehud Barak, said that the defense establishment would find solutions to "terror from Hebron and Qassams from Gaza."
Another Israeli cabinet minister, Zeev Boim, ( OLMERT ALLY, KADIMA) told Israel Radio that the attackers appeared to have come from the Mount Hebron area.
The Israeli woman who was killed in the Dimona bombing, Liuvov Razdolaskya, 73, was buried on Tuesday afternoon.
Taghreed El-Khodary contributed reporting from Gaza City
*******************************Speaking at an officers' course at the Shizafon Armor Corps Training Base, Barak acknowledged, "Today there were again rockets in Sderot and yesterday there was a terror attack in Dimona." The Defense Minister added, however, that "now we will find the solutions to the terror emanating from Hevron and the Kassams from Gaza."
Security sources said there is speculation the Monday's suicide bombers may have come from Hevron, and not from Gaza by way of the Sinai Peninsula after crossing into Egypt through the demolished border fence last week.
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