In a carefully planned attack, Palestinian militants dressed as Israeli soldiers bombed a bus near the entrance of a Jewish settlement on Tuesday, then fired on its passengers. Seven people were killed.
It was the first deadly attack on Israeli civilians since June 20, and it occurred hours before officials from the United States, Russia, European Union and United Nations met in New York to discuss ways of ending more than 21 months of violence and easing the humanitarian situation in Palestinian territories.
Several militant groups rushed to claim responsibility for the attack, which was a near replica of one on December 12 that killed 11 people in the same place – at the entrance to the ultra-Orthodox Jewish settlement of Emmanuel, between the West Bank towns of Qalqiliya and Nablus.
Witnesses reported hearing a loud explosion as the armoured bus, travelling a regular route between Emmanuel and another ultra-Orthodox town inside Israel, Bnei Brak, neared the settlement entrance.
The powerful bomb blast stopped the bus and was followed by smaller grenade explosions and bursts of automatic fire that lasted for several minutes.
Rachel Gross (17) a high school student, said the bus lurched into the air when the powerful bomb went off. ”I got down under the seats, as fast as I could, because the terrorists began firing bursts and throwing grenades, it went on and on it seemed like eternity,” she said while visiting victims at a hospital. She was not hurt.
She said when she got up, she saw an unexploded grenade on the seat in front of her. The doors of the bus were jammed shut, she said, and rescue workers came in through the windows.
Moshe Avraham-Cohen, in charge of security for the settlement, said he was in his office when he heard the explosion, then drove to the scene in his armoured car, only to find it eerily quiet.
”I opened the (bullet proof) car door a bit. Suddenly I saw three soldiers at the side of the bus. I was happy, seeing they had already arrived. I was going to ask them if they needed help, and before I could get the words out they shot at me,” he said. He said he sped away.
Taxi driver Yitzhak Yazdi said he heard the explosion and saw stones flying over the road as he neared the scene, plumes of smoke billowing 10 metres high. ”I saw two terrorists who were running away from the road and they hid behind a rock,” he said. The ambush killed seven people and injured 14, three of them seriously, police and hospital officials said. Among the injured was a 2-year-old, two 12-year-olds and a pregnant woman, Israel TV said. The pregnant woman was shot in the head, said Ron Nachman, mayor of nearby Ariel.
In more than 21 months of fighting, 1 758 people have been killed on the Palestinian side, and 572 on the Israeli side, including Tuesday’s attack.
The last fatal attack on Israeli civilians occurred June 20, when a gunman killed five Israelis in the Jewish settlement of Itamar, near Nablus in the north West Bank.
The lull in attacks was widely seen in Israel as evidence that the policy of reoccupying the Palestinian Authority’s autonomous zones was the best method for preventing further attacks on Israelis.
”If we had not been there, we would have had 12, or 10 attacks rather than one,” said Ranaan Gissin, a representative for Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
He said that until the Palestinians unify their security services and use them to ”eradicate terrorism… we will have to be deployed in those areas where we are in order to stop this wave of terrorist activity.”
Foreign Minister Shimon Peres told Israel TV that he cancelled a meeting set for Wednesday with senior Palestinian officials because of the attack.
The military wing of Hamas, Izzadine al-Qassam, claimed responsibility in two separate telephone calls to The Associated Press in Jerusalem, saying the militants responsible were safe in the Nablus area.
However, two other groups also claimed it: the Syria-based Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine said it carried out the attack. And Abu Dhabi TV said the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, affiliated with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement, had claimed responsibility.
It was considered unlikely that Israel would stage a military retaliation in response to the attack as long as the talks continued in New York.
The Palestinian Authority condemned the attack in a statement – possibly also in connection with the New York gathering. The Palestinians frequently condemn suicide attacks inside Israel ? but not those in the West Bank and Gaza, arguing that Palestinians have a legitimate right to resist Israeli occupation.
US President George Bush condemned the attack, White House representative Ari Fleischer said. ”This underscores the importance of focusing on peace and working with leaders in the Palestinian Authority who are dedicated to peace,” he said – an apparent reference to the US position that it won’t deal with Arafat any more.
Fleischer said that since Bush’s June speech calling for Palestinian reforms and a new leadership in the Palestinian Authority ”there have been some interesting rumblings from within the Palestinian Authority about the direction they would like to go in the future.”
Arafat outlined a series of reforms he has proposed in a letter to the Bush administration, but in an interview with The AP over the weekend, he refused to step down. He admitted, however, that he hadn’t decided whether he would be a candidate in January elections.
On Tuesday, Mahmoud Abbas, a senior Palestinian official once touted as a successor to Arafat, told reporters in Abu Dhabi that he wouldn’t run in the elections.
On Monday, an Arab diplomatic official said the Palestinians would support a proposal to set up a provisional Palestinian state within the next year, and then leave two years to establish the final borders and other contentious issues. The idea is similar to what Bush proposed in last month’s speech. – Sapa-AP