A Palestinian suicide bomber killed eight people, including a baby girl, when he blew himself up in an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Jerusalem today after the Jewish Sabbath, police said.
The attack, in which the bomber also died, followed vows by militant groups to avenge the deaths of 21 Palestinians in an offensive by Israeli forces in two refugee camps in the West Bank and dealt a deadly new blow to a Saudi peace initiative.
Fierce flames from a destroyed car rose into the night sky on the street where the blast ripped through the Beit Israel district of the city just as worshippers were emerging from synagogues at the end of the Jewish day of rest.
Ultra-religious Jews picked through the debris for body parts for burial and a toddler's red leather shoe lay abandoned on the ground.
A doctor at the city's Bikur Holim hospital said one of the dead was a baby girl but gave no other details about her.
Police said 57 people were wounded in the attack and medical workers said at least six of those were in a critical condition.
One witness said he had seen a severed head that had been removed from beneath a car. Police sealed off the immediate area and said they were searching for other bombs as a precaution.
"It was crazy. There were kids and adults running all over the place. I saw one woman sitting on the pavement screaming that her son had been killed," said one 22-year-old man, who gave his name as Alan, from London.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but Israeli officials swiftly blamed Palestinian militants behind a wave of deadly attacks in their 17-month-old uprising against Israeli occupation.
"This is yet another attack of Palestinian terror," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mr Yaffa Ben Ari said.
"Palestinians have not realized that through violence they will not get anything, that no solution to the conflict will come through terror. We will continue our struggle against terrorism."
Stunned residents of the neighborhood, the target of at least one previous bombing, pressed up against security tape near the scene of the blast, many of the men in the long, silk coats ultra-Orthodox Jews wear on the Sabbath.
Israeli security sources initially said the blast had been caused by a booby-trapped car, but Jerusalem police chief Mr Mickey Levy said a suicide bomber with a shrapnel bomb strapped to him had walked up to a group of people and blown himself up.
Militant groups had vowed to avenge the incursions into the Balata and Jenin refugee camps in the West Bank to hunt down suspected gunmen and bombers Israel blames for killings in the uprising against Israeli occupation.
At least 21 Palestinians, civilians as well as police and gunmen, and two Israeli soldiers have been killed in the raids on the camps, which were launched on Thursday.