Carnage returns to town that suffered Passover massacre

The suicide bomber entered one of the narrow lanes of Netanya's fruit and vegetable market dressed in Israeli army uniform.

Then between the closely packed shops, he detonated an explosive belt, hurling a fusillade of nails and screws, overturning stalls and scattering produce in all directions.

The explosion killed three Israelis and wounded at least 57, nine seriously.

It was a return of carnage to the Mediterranean resort. Netanya is the town where a bomber killed 29 Jews celebrating the feast in a hotel on Passover eve six weeks ago.

Ambulance crews were quickly on the scene of yesterday's atrocity. One man stretchered out had been stripped naked by the blast, his flesh red and blistered.

Police confirmed that they had received an intelligence warning half an hour before the explosion at 4.20pm, but said it was too general and too late. Sunday is a quiet day in the market. Otherwise, the casualty toll might have been higher. "We were laughing about how the day had passed so quietly, and then suddenly there was an explosion," Avi Shemesh, a market vendor, said. "I saw blood everywhere, people staggering and a guy whose face was all burned."

Eli Maimon told Army Radio: "I heard a huge boom and saw body parts flying. He [the bomber] came in an army uniform."

Security sources suspect the bomber infiltrated from the West Bank town of Tulkarm, four miles east of Netanya, which is still surrounded by Israeli tanks. Two Palestinian organisations – Hamas and the Popular Front – claimed responsibility in unconfirmed calls to Arab television stations. The bombing shattered the relative peace of the last two weeks.

The last suicide bombing in Israel was on 7 May, when a Hamas militant killed 15 Israelis at a pool hall just south of Tel Aviv.

Hours after yesterday's attack, a number of Israeli tanks moved into part of the West Bank city of Ramallah, where the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat has his headquarters. There were no immediate reports of shooting, and the tanks were not near Mr Arafat's compound, witnesses said.

Israeli officials predicted that the response would take the form of strikes on selected targets rather than the massive retaliation that followed the Passover bombing.

Israeli security forces have continued almost nightly incursions into West Bank towns to kill or capture suspected terrorists.

Mr Sharon may not want to be blamed for plunging the West Bank back into heavier combat at a time when Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, is hinting at elections and reforms that Israel, the US, Europe and moderate Arab governments are demanding. On Saturday, Palestinian ministers offered to resign to speed the process along.

In a first, premature, sign of election fever, a dissident graduate of Israeli and Palestinian prisons announced yesterday that he would run against Mr Arafat for president of the Palestinian Authority (PA). He is Abdel Sattar Kassem, 54, a political science professor from the West Bank town of Nablus who has been an outspoken critic of Mr Arafat since before the 1993 Oslo accords.

Between lectures at Al Najah University, he told The Independent that his prime objective would be to end the corruption from which the Palestinians had been suffering.

"Self-rule has caused so much disappointment in the Palestinian streets," he said. "It has made our life very difficult. And over the past 11 years the political process has not produced any acceptable results."

Dr Kassem has a doctorate in political science from the University of Missouri. He spent two years in Israel's notorious "Ansar 3" jail for campaigning against Israeli occupation during the first intifada in the 1980s. Under the PA a decade later, he was imprisoned for eight months for speaking out against Mr Arafat. Anonymous gunmen shot him in the legs after he denounced the Palestinian leader in a Hamas journal.