About 5,000 Palestinians turned out in Gaza City tonight to rally their support for a bombing at a Jerusalem university which killed seven people and injured at least 80 others.
The crowd chanted their backing for the radical Islamic group Hamas, which claimed the bombing at Hebrew University, calling for more of the same and warning Israelis not to leave their houses for risk of being hit by more bombers on their way.
The Palestinian Authority condemned the bombing at the Frank Sinatra centre in the university's Mount Scopus campus near Arab East Jerusalem.
Six of the seven fatalities were of foreign origin, as the blast hit an international student centre. At least one was an American woman, while another victim was a French man.
At the rally in Gaza, a Hamas spokesman shouted over a loudspeaker that Israel was now under a bombers' curfew from the group's armed wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades.
"We tell the Zionists not to leave their houses because our Qassam martyrs are coming to make more military operations," he told the crowd of supporters waving Hamas flags and holding pictures of the brigades leader, Salah Shehade, killed in an Israeli air raid last week that also cost 14 other lives.
The crowd called for revenge and for more operations matching the Hamas bomb at Hebrew University's cafeteria for international students, which killed seven people and injured 70, most of them foreigners.
Israeli intelligence officers have said they have warnings of 60 suicide bombing in the works, and all Palestinian hardline factions have vowed revenge for Shehade's death.
Shortly before the blast, Israel's security cabinet decided to pursue a punitive policy against families of Palestinian suicide bombers in a bid to deter such attacks in which over 230 Israelis have been killed in two years, political sources said.
But it was unclear how the government planned to vault the legal hurdles it has already faced in threatening to exile relatives of suicide bombers from the West Bank to the fenced-in Gaza Strip.
AFP &