A suspected suicide bomber blew himself up at the entrance to a shopping mall in central Israel yesterday, killing at least five people people and wounding dozens of others, Channel 10 TV said. Ambulances raced to the Sharon shopping centre in Netanya, a seaside city that has been a frequent target of suicide bombings in a five-year-old Palestinian uprising. ?It appears that a person came to the entrance of the mall and blew up,? Yisrael Klein, a witness to the blast, told Israel Radio. Security guards are stationed at the doors of major shopping centres in Israel.

A Reuters witness saw two bodies and the Magen David Adom ambulance service said at least 35 people were wounded, seven of them seriously. Channel 10 television put the death toll at four. It was the first such bombing since October 26, when a suicide bomber killed six people in the coastal city of Hadera. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the latest attack, which dealt another blow to a ceasefire declared in February.