A suicide bomber blew himself up on a crowded bus in downtown Tel Aviv on Thursday, killing at least five other people and wounding 49 in the second such attack in two days.
The blast tore through the bus while it was driving on Allenby Street, in the heart of a teeming restaurant and business district.
Herzl Ben-Moshe, a store owner trying to rescue passengers, said he saw several people lying on the floor of the bus, including one man whose legs had been blown off. ”People were yelling, ‘take us out of here,”’ Ben-Moshe said.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility, though various Israeli media outlets reported conflicting claims by the militant Islamic Jihad and Hamas groups.
Abdel Aziz Rantisi, a Hamas representative, said he welcomed the attack, but did not know who was behind it. ”The Zionists are paying for the crimes and terrorism of their leaders and they should know that we are the real owners of this land and we would never give it up,” he said.
Wednesday’s attack, in which a suicide bomber blew himself at a bus stop in northern Israel and also killed an Israeli policeman, was claimed by Islamic Jihad.
Israeli Defence Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer convened army commanders for consultations on how to respond. Israeli troops already occupy most Palestinian towns in the West Bank and confine hundreds of thousands of residents their to their homes daily to try to keep militants out of Israel.
However, troops lifted the curfew in the town of Jenin for several hours on Tuesday for the first time in weeks, and there was some speculation that the recent days attackers may have come from the town, a hotbed of militants.
Thursday’s explosion went off just after 1 pm (1000 GMT), outside one of the major synagogues in Tel Aviv, across the street from a Starbucks coffee shop and a block away from the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange.
”People were hurting, screaming, wounded. We saw pieces of people,” said Zohara Pillo (27) a visitor from Haifa. ”The driver was sitting in his seat and his hands were on the window and he was dead, he was all blackened,” she said.
The blast scorched the bus and blew out its windows. One man with blood over his bare chest was wheeled away by paramedics. Another man sat on the sidewalk, crying. Religious volunteers in white overalls later searched the area, picking bits of flesh and placing them into plastic bags. Jewish law requires burial of the entire body.
Mark Sofer, an official in the Israeli Foreign Ministry, said that ”once again, the utter bestiality of Palestinian terrorism has reared its ugly head, on a bus in Tel Aviv.” Sofer held the Palestinian Authority responsible, saying it had done nothing to rein in militants.
The Palestinian Authority said it condemned attacks on all civilians, whether Israelis or Palestinians. The Tel Aviv attack is ”totally against the (Palestinian) national interest, and it gives (Israeli Prime Minister Ariel) Sharon’s government and his occupation army the pretext to continue killing, to continue the siege and to continue settlement activities,” the statement said.
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat has condemned attacks on Israeli civilians – most recently in a speech to parliament last week – though Israel accuses him of doing little to prevent them.
The Palestinians say Israel’s military strikes have rendered their security services powerless against the militants.
Allenby Street has previously been targeted by Palestinian militants. On March 30, a suicide bomber from the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a militia linked to Arafat’s Fatah movement, walked into a cafe on Allenby Street and blew himself up, killing one woman and wounding 30 people.
Before this week, there had been no suicide bombings in Israel since August 4.
In other developments on Thursday, a 12-year-old Palestinian boy breaking curfew in the West Bank town of Ramallah to buy cigarettes for his father was killed by shots a witness said were fired from a nearby Israeli tank. The Israeli military said it was looking into the incident.
In Abu Dis, a West Bank suburb of Jerusalem, Israeli bulldozers razed the family homes of two Palestinian suicide bombers who blew themselves up on a pedestrian mall in Jerusalem on December 1, killing 11 bystanders. – Sapa-AP