A Hamas suicide bomber blew himself up at the entrance to a shopping mall in the Israeli coastal town of Netanya late yesterday morning, killing six Israeli civilians and badly injuring more than 30.
News of the blast, relayed to a Hamas demonstration in the nearby West Bank city of Ramallah, was met with cheers and chants of joy and the distribution of sweets among the marchers.
Israel's leading cabinet ministers convened in emergency session, and one minister urged an immediate ban on all Palestinians entering Israel.
In response to the blast, last night, Israeli F-16 fighter jets bombed targets in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, killing at least eight people, and its helicopter gunships blew up a building of the Force 17 elite unit in Ramallah, killing at least one man.
The Nablus attack marked the first time Israel has used fighterjets against the Palestinians.
In another incident on a day that brought Israel and the Palestinian Authority a step closer to all-out conflict, Palestinian gunmen opened fire on a vehicle north of Jerusalem yesterday afternoon, killing an Israeli army officer and leaving his mother badly hurt. On the Israeli-Lebanese border, meanwhile, a Lebanese civilian was killed during a clash with Israeli troops.
The suicide bomber was named as Mahmoud Ahmad Marmash (21) from Tulkarm - the West Bank city just five miles east of Netanya.
Clad in a large blue jacket, with his explosives strapped to a belt around his waist, he had been spotted outside the mall by several locals and even by a security guard on the roof.
Local police had been alerted, and an officer was only about 50 yards from the entrance to the large concrete-and-glass mall when the bomber detonated his explosives.
"I looked him in the eye, and he blew himself up," said Mr Lior Kamissa, a security guard at the mall entrance, who was taken to hospital with injuries from the blast.
"I didn't see him push a button, nothing. He just exploded and disappeared."
The blast, which rocked the entire street-corner mall and buildings all around it, sent bodies flying, and threw glass, metal and human flesh across the surrounding pavements. "It was awful - chaos, hysteria, babies screaming," said Mr Ilan Sarousi, also speaking from a hospital bed.
The third bombing in Netanya this year, it brought the heaviest death toll in a single attack since the Intifada erupted last September.
Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, spiritual leader of Hamas, said that the blast came in response to Israeli "violence against innocent people. Now Israel is harvesting the reaction".
A second Hamas spokesman called the attack a response to the Israeli army's killing, earlier this week, of five Palestinian policemen at a barracks outside Ramallah.
Other Hamas officials, however, said the attack was the latest in a series of 10 suicide bombings with which Hamas had vowed to greet February's election of the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon; there were, according to these officials, five more blasts still to come.
The Palestinian Authority issued a general condemnation of the killing of any "civilians and innocent people".
The Palestinian President, Mr Yasser Arafat, had no immediate reaction.
Yesterday morning, he attended prayers at a mosque in Gaza where the imam urged the entire Arab world to "wake up to the threat of Zionism". In recent days, for the first time, Hamas spokespeople have been allowed onto PA-controlled TV to encourage suicide bombings, and Hamas's Mahmoud Nazar asserted yesterday that, "there are no such things as civilians in the enemy state because, at 18, all of them, men and women, become soldiers". Opinion polls suggest that, after almost eight months of Intifada violence, during which some 450 Palestinians and 80 Israelis have been killed, an unprecedented 70 per cent of Palestinians now support suicide bombings inside Israel.
Most analysts believe there are dozens, if not hundreds of young Palestinians ready to follow Marmash's path to "martyrdom".
The Sharon government accused the PA of actively encouraging the attacks. Mr Rehavam Ze'evi, the far-right Minister of Tourism, called for all Palestinians to be barred from Israel.
The Foreign Minister, Mr Shimon Peres, who has been at the heart of recent ceasefire negotiations, said that attacks such as yesterday's reduced the prospects of restoring trust between the sides.
President Bush, who may now send a special envoy to the region to try and broker a ceasefire, urged both sides to "break the cycle of violence" and enter "meaningful discussions" towards a political settlement.