2008 Dimona suicide bombing

The 2008 Dimona bombing was a suicide attack carried out by the militant organizations al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in Dimona, Israel on February 4, 2008.

The attack
On February 4, 2008, a Palestinian militant detonated an explosives belt at a shopping centre in Dimona, Israel.

The Israeli police managed to shoot dead an accomplice which was wounded in the first blast before he could detonate his own belt.

One Israeli woman was killed in the attack while nine other people were injured (one of them critically). It was the first 'successful' suicide attack against Israeli civilians since the Eilat bakery bombing on January 29, 2007.

Fatalities
The sole person killed in the attack was 73-year-old Lyubov Razdol'skaya (Любовь Раздольская). Along with her husband, Edward Gedalin (Эдуард Гедалин), she moved from Tbilisi, USSR to Israel in 1990. Both worked in the GSSR Academy of Sciences Institute of Physics. After moving to Israel they worked in the physics department of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and retired in 2002. Gedalin himself was critically injured in the attack and hospitalized at Soroka University Medical Center in Beer Sheva.

The perpetrators
The perpetrators were identified as Muhammed Herbawi (محمد الحرباوي) and Shadi Zghayer (شادي الزغيّر), both from the Palestinian city of Hebron in the West Bank, the place which they are believed to have travelled from.

Israeli retaliation
On July 26, 2008, IDF and Israeli police forces killed Shihab Natsheh, a 25-year-old Hamas member from Hebron who, according to the IDF, was the explosives engineer that prepared the demolition charge used to carry out the Dimona suicide bombing.

Government reactions

 * Involved parties
 * : Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told a meeting of his Kadima party that Israel was fighting a "relentless war... against anyone who tries to harm Israeli citizens".


 * : Hamas spokesman Ayman Taha praised the bombing as a "glorious act" and said that it was a "natural reaction to months of killing" of Palestinians by the Israeli military.


 * International
 * : Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs David Miliband condemned the attack in a press release and said: "Today’s attack, the first in Israel for a year, aimed to undermine the peace process. Terrorist atrocities must not deflect us from our shared goal of just and lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians based on a two state solution".


 * : Department of State spokesman Sean McCormack condemned the attack during a press briefing and said: "All of these incidents point to the fact that we need to do everything that we possibly can, along with our partners in the international system, to help the Israelis and the Palestinians come to a political agreement and accommodation on the issues that separate them. At that point, the Palestinian people will be able to decide which pathway they want to go down; do they want to go down the pathway of having a Palestinian state or do they want to continue down a pathway represented by Hamas and other rejectionist groups that's a pathway of violence and that does not lead to a state".