An Israeli woman was killed and at least 10 other people were wounded when a pair of Palestinian suicide bombers attacked in the southern Israel town of Dimona on Monday.
The first of the two bombers blew himself up around noon near a coffee shop in Dimona's busy commercial district. The second bomber reportedly attempted to wait until a large number of security forces and rescue personnel arrived to detonate his explosives, but was prevented from doing so by the first doctor who arrived on the scene.
According to Israel National News, the doctor noticed that one of the people lying at the site of the attack was wearing an unexploded bomb belt and notified a nearby police officer, who proceeded to shoot and kill the terrorist.
Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas' US-funded and trained Fatah movement claimed credit for the attack.
Israeli security officials later expressed concern that the bombers had crossed into southern Israel via the porous border with Egypt. Tens of thousands of Palestinians, including many terrorists, are believed to have slipped deep into the Sinai Peninsula after breaching Egypt's border with the Gaza Strip last week. Israel fears many more terrorists may be on their way across the Israel-Egypt border or already inside southern Israel.
Some officials in Jerusalem have directly blamed the security situation on Egypt for failing to prevent Palestinian residents of Gaza from freely flowing across the border for more than a week.
In other violence, Palestinian terrorists operating out of northern Gaza fired four rockets at the southern Israel town of Sderot on Monday. There were no injuries reported in the attack.
In the Judean town of Hebron, Israeli forces arrested a knife-weilding Palestinian at the burial place of Israel's biblical patriarchs. The man later confessed to planning to kill Israeli soldiers stationed there.