NETANYA (Israel), May 19: A suicide bomber blew himself up in a vegetable market in the central Israeli city of Netanya on Sunday, killing three other people and wounding more than 35 others, police said.

The afternoon attack in the seaside city raised the spectre of sharp Israeli military retaliation nearly two weeks after Israel held its fire following a suicide bombing that killed 15 Israelis in Rishon Lezion, near Tel Aviv.

“A suicide bomber blew himself up near stalls in the market. We know of one dead, who is apparently the bomber, and a second citizen killed,” a police official said immediately after the blast.

“I heard a huge boom and saw body parts flying,” a witness, Eli Maimon, told Army Radio. “He (the bomber) came in an army uniform.”

Other witnesses said the market was relatively empty at the start of the Israeli work week. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the blast.

It shattered a relative lull during which Israelis had begun to return to shopping centres and national parks and came after a recent six-week Israeli military offensive in the West Bank, launched after a wave of Palestinian suicide attacks.

Palestinians are still picking up the pieces from the assault and pondering elections and reform in the face of internal, international and Israeli demands for a restructuring of the Palestinian Authority and its security forces.

Israel planned a military operation in the Gaza Strip after the May 7 Rishon Lezion attack but cancelled the assault when details of the offensive were leaked to the Israeli media amid reports that top generals, fearing heavy casualties, opposed the sweep.

Police and the Magen David Adom ambulance service said more than 35 people were wounded, seven of them seriously. Netanya, some 20kms north of Tel Aviv and close to the border with the West Bank, has been targeted in the past by Palestinian suicide bombers.

A suicide bombing on March 27 at a Netanya hotel killed 29 people during the Jewish Passover holiday and triggered the West Bank offensive two days later.

Mahmoud al-Zahar, a spokesman for the Hamas, said the Netanya blast showed that “Sharon has failed to achieve any success in the last invasion against the West Bank cities”.—Reuters