At least 12 people were killed and 24 injured when a suicide bomber blew himself up in the "Matza" restaurant, at around 2:40 P.M. on Sunday, in the Neve Sha'anan neighborhood of Haifa, near the "Grand Kenyon" shopping mall.

Magen David Adom first-aid workers said that the wounded had been evacuated to hospital, some of them in critical condition. The restaurant, which was crowded at the time of the blast, is located in a gas station complex.

Ambulances rushed to the scene of the attack, and first-aid workers were evacuating the injured. Police have closed off the area to the public, and have a helicopter up in the sky in an effort to capture those who transported the bomber to the site of the attack.

Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack, and Hamas official Abdel Aziz Rantisis told Abu Dhabi television that the attacks would continue until Israel ended its operation in the West Bank city of Ramallah, where the IDF has been occupying Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat's compound since Friday.

"Watching people on fire is just horrible. I heard an explosion, I went into the gas station and I started to deal with the injured people," a witness, Shimon Sabag, told Israel Radio.

"I couldn't deal with the critical injuries so I turned to the moderate. I tried to put out the fire, even the moderately injured were on fire," he said.

The explosion comes less than 24 hours after another suicide bomber blew himself up in a Tel Aviv restaurant Saturday night, wounding over 30 people. On Friday, two Israelis were killed in a suicide bombing in a Jerusalem supermarket.

"Israel's three main cities were hit in three days. Palestinian suicide bombers have made terror attacks a daily event," David Baker, an official in Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's office, said.

"Israel will fight relentlessly. We will leave no stone unturned until we stop this campaign of terror directed against us," he said.