Refugee camps celebrate suicide bomb

Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon rejoiced with celebratory rounds of gunfire and dancing following today's Jerusalem explosion.

At least 18 people, six of them children, died in the blast.

In Ein el-Hilweh, Lebanon's largest refugee camp, men performed the traditional foot-stomping dabkeh folk dance.

Women and children offered Arabic sweets and juice to passers-by and said "Mabrouk!" to one another, which is Arabic for congratulations.

Guerrillas in the camp, on the outskirts of the southern port city of Sidon, celebrated by firing machine guns into the air for more than an hour.

"Our people will not be able to liberate our land and establish a Palestinian state except through such suicide bombings," said Colonel Mounir Makdah, who heads a dissident faction of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's mainstream Fatah movement in Ein el-Hilweh.

Khaled Aref, the camp's Fatah chief, said: "Blood begets blood. The criminal Sharon has worked toward war, not peace, ever since coming to office."

Sporadic gunfire was also heard in refugee camps in Beirut's mainly Shiite Muslim suburbs after news of the bombing.