A PALESTINIAN woman suicide bomber struck at the main border crossing between Israel and the Gaza Strip yesterday, killing at least four Israelis and wounding seven people, security sources said.

The woman blew herself up in a terminal where Palestinian labourers were going through Israeli security checks before entering a nearby industrial complex.?Glass and black smoke flew everywhere. Arabs were screaming, Jews were screaming, nobody knew what was going on,? a Palestinian witness said.

Israeli security sources said two Palestinians were among the wounded. It was the first Palestinian suicide attack since a December 25 bombing killed four Israelis near Tel Aviv and raised further doubts about the prospects for reviving a US-backed ?road map? to peace.

A caller to Reuters office in the Gaza Strip claimed joint responsibility for the bombing in the name of the militant Islamic group Hamas and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed offshoot of Yasser Arafat?s Fatah movement.

Witnesses said the bomber, identified by Hamas as a 21-year-old woman from Gaza City, was limping as she approached a metal detector operated by Israeli security personnel. When she set off the metal detector, she told soldiers she had a broken leg and was wearing a metal splint.?Soldiers asked her to step forward, and as she did so, there was an explosion,? said a Palestinian woman standing nearby. ?I thought my ears were exploding.?

On Tuesday night Palestinian gunmen killed an Israeli settler driving near the Jewish settlement of Talmon in the West Bank.

No dramatic pullout from Gaza Strip

The al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades said it had carried out the shooting in response to a ?widespread campaign? by Israeli soldiers, who have killed some of the group?s members during recent raids in Palestinian cities and towns.

?We promise our people that we will avenge the blood of our noble martyrs and we swear there will be more martyrdom attacks until occupation leaves our land,? the group said in a statement posted on its web site.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon raised the possibility on Tuesday that the army could one day leave the Gaza Strip, where up to 8 000 Jewish settlers live under heavy military protection alongside more than one million Palestinians.

?I hope the day will come when we will not have to sit in the Strip,? he said in a speech to a group of Bedouin Arabs serving in the Israeli army that was broadcast on Army Radio.

But a senior official, commenting on Sharon?s remarks, said there would be no dramatic pullout from the Gaza Strip, there was no certainty that settlements would go and there could be no relinquishing of any location vital to security.

Recent polls indicate most Israelis would be happy to abandon the Gaza Strip and isolated settlements in the West Bank if it meant an end to more than three years of violence in which more than 2,300 Palestinians and 840 Israelis have died.

Nidal al-Mughrabi