Suicide bomber kills 3 in Israel's Eilat resort

At his family home in the northern Gaza Strip, Siksik's brother Naeem told reporters: "We knew he was going to carry out a martyrdom operation. His mother and father prayed for him to succeed."

In Jerusalem, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert voiced fears the attack could scare tourists away from Eilat.

Nearly 180,000 foreign tourists visited the resort, at the northern tip of the Red Sea, last year. The city has been spared the violence of a more than six-year-long Palestinian uprising.

"I believe Eilat will overcome this blow and will continue to be the happy and magical city we have come to know," Olmert said.

Israeli military affairs commentators said the bomber may have crossed from Gaza into Egypt and then made his way across the Sinai peninsula to the porous Egyptian-Israeli frontier near Eilat.

An Islamic Jihad spokesman said Siksik infiltrated through Jordan, which also borders Eilat, a city of 57,000 people and located some 350 kilometres (220 miles) south of Jerusalem.

A Palestinian suicide bomber last struck in Israel on April 17, 2006, killing 11 people outside a restaurant in Tel Aviv in an attack claimed by the Islamic Jihad group.

(Additional reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza and Corinne Heller and Jonathan Saul in Jerusalem)