TEL AVIV, March 31: Four Israelis were killed in a West Bank suicide bombing late on Thursday just hours after final election results gave acting premier Ehud Olmert a boost in his ambitious plans to fix Israel’s final borders in the territory.

Three Jewish settlers and a 20-year-old woman performing civilian national service were killed when the bomber blew himself up at the entrance to the Kedumim settlement west of the city of Nablus, police said.

The bomber, who was disguised as an ultra-Orthodox Jew, had hitched a ride with an elderly couple who were among the dead.

The Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed offshoot of moderate Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas’s mainstream Fatah movement, said it had carried out the attack.

It named the bomber as Ahmed Masharka, 24, from the flashpoint southern West Bank city of Al Khalil.

It was the first suicide bombing carried out by a group other than Islamic Jihad since Palestinian factions declared a truce early last year.

The previous seven attacks against Israeli targets had all been carried out by Islamic Jihad, prompting Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz to order security forces to step up efforts to carry out targeted killings against the group’s leaders.

Israel had been particularly incensed by an attack carried out by Islamic Jihad from Gaza against southern Israel using an imported industrially manufactured rocket rather than the makeshift devices previously used by militants in the territory.—AFP