A Palestinian Resistance bomber has killed two Israelis in a shopping mall as Israeli Prime Minster Ariel Sharon won a tenuous lease on life for his minority government, surviving parliamentary no-confidence. The London-based Al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper said it had received a claim of responsibility from the Al-Quds Brigade of the resistance Palestinian group Islamic Jihad for the bombing at the Arim shopping mall in the central Israeli city of Kfar Saba.

Earlier, a Palestinian Hamas resistance leader and another person were killed in an explosion in a car in the West Bank city of Nablus that Palestinian officials blamed on Israel.

In the Gaza Strip, Israeli occupation forces killed five Palestinians in incidents near volatile border areas.

SHARON SURVIVES VOTE

Meanwhile, the Knesset, rejecting three no-confidence motions in Sharon's shrunken coalition on Monday, approved his choice of hawkish former army chief Shaul Mofaz as defense minister.

Losing the no-confidence votes would have forced Sharon into an early general election. He can now press on with efforts to enlist ultra nationalist parties into the right-wing government he hopes to form after the collapse of his broad coalition.

Israel was plunged into political crisis last week when the center-left Labour Party bolted from Sharon's "national unity government" in a dispute over funding for Jewish settlements on occupied lands where Palestinians want to establish their state.

Palestinians have expressed alarm that an Israeli government dominated by right-wing nationalists would be ideologically opposed to a Palestinian state and would use harsher methods to crush their two-year-old uprising in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Observers say how Israel responds to Monday's bombing could give Washington an answer as to whether a government without Labour's moderates would avoid, as Sharon has promised, any action that could damage U.S. efforts to win Arab support for possible war on Iraq.

PHOTO CAPTION

Israeli police look through debris following a suicide bomb explosion a shopping mall in the central Israeli town of Kafr Sava November 4, 2002. A suspected Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up in the busy shopping mall killing at least one person. (Havakuk Levison/Reuter