JERUSALEM (Islamweb & News Agencies) - A Resistance bombing claimed by the Palestinian Resistance group Hamas has killed 16 Israelis and wounded 140 others.
The Resistance bomb devastated the dining room of the luxury Park Hotel in Netanya, leaving wires dangling and chunks of concrete and metal bars across broken chairs and tables.
Corpses were lined up in white bodybags on the pavement. Rescue workers clambered through the wreckage and stretchered away dazed survivors.
Israeli media said the bomber walked in with the explosives in a bag as guests prepared for a feast at the start of the Passover, which marks the biblical exodus from Egypt.
As expected, the Israeli government blamed Palestinian President Yasser Arafat for not cracking down on so-called militants.
Arafat's Palestinian Authority condemned the bombing, in the Mediterranean resort town of Netanya, and vowed to hunt down those behind the attack.
The United States and the European Union bemoaned the latest in a series of Palestinian Resistance bombings punctuating the 18-month-old uprising against Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Wednesday's was one of the bloodiest Resistance assaults of the Palestinian uprising. In the the fiercest such attack, a Palestinian blew himself up outside a Tel Aviv disco last June, killing 21 people, many of them immigrants from the former Soviet Union.

PHOTO CAPTION:
Rescue workers carry a boy injured in a suicide bombing to hospital in the Israeli seaside resort of Netanya March 27, 2002. A Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up in the dining room of the hotel, killing at least 15 people and wounding about 100 as they sat down to a traditional Passover feast, police said. (Stringer/Israel/Reuters)