Mossad ordered to discover who was responsible - but officials point finger at al-Qa'ida

"Our hand will reach them," said Israel's Defence Minister, Shaul Mofaz, after the attacks in Kenya yesterday. He promised Israel would hunt down those responsible and retaliate.

Ariel Sharon, the Prime Minister, ordered Mossad, the intelligence agency, to find out who was behind the bombing of the Hotel Paradise and the missile attack on a chartered passenger plane.

Meanwhile the Israeli embassy in the South African capital, Pretoria, was closed because of warnings that it might be attacked.

While Mr Sharon and his ministers said publicly that they did not know who was behind the attacks, unnamed officials were busy briefing that the attacks showed every sign of being the work of al-Qa'ida.

The Ha'aretz newspaper's website quoted "security sources" as saying that, though they did not have any hard information, the "professionalism" of the attacks pointed to Osama bin Laden's organisation.

Binyamin Netanyahu, the Foreign Minister, was busy sowing doubts. He didn't know whether Palestinian groups were involved in the attacks in Kenya, Mr Netanyahu said, but he claimed he did know they had been trying to get hold of shoulder-launched missiles. Kenyan police said shoulder-launched missiles were fired at the Israeli plane.

Mr Netanyahu said: "Terror organisations and the regimes behind them are able to arm themselves with weapons which can cause mass casualties anywhere and everywhere.

"Today, they're firing the missiles at Israeli planes, tomorrow they'll fire missiles at American planes, British planes, every country's aircraft." The Israeli government has long sought to portray its fight against Palestinian militants as directly equivalent to George Bush's "war on terror".

Mr Sharon said: "The state of Israel is facing a wave of murderous terrorism." He linked the attacks in Kenya with Palestinian militant attacks on Israelis. "Women, children, old people and young people are being killed simply because they are Jews. We are fighting terror everywhere."

An adviser to Mr Sharon, Zalman Shoval, said: "We will have to wait for further information and intelligence to see where the tracks lead to and then Israel will make decisions and it will not make any rash decisions." General Dan Halutz, the head of the Israeli air force, said anti-missile defences were not usually fitted to civilian aircraft but, if airlines wanted them, they could be.