A teenage suicide bomber dressed as an Orthodox Jew killed 16 people on a rush-hour bus in the heart of Jerusalem yesterday, fulfilling a vow by the militant Islamic movement Hamas to avenge a botched Israeli attempt to assassinate its political leader a day earlier.
More than 100 people were injured as the explosion destroyed the bus, scattered body parts for hundreds of feet and blew the windows out of buildings over a wide area.
Less than an hour later, Israeli helicopters launched another missile attack in Gaza on a car carrying Hamas activists. Two Hamas members were killed, including a bodyguard to its spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, and four passersby, including two women.
The attacks continued just after midnight, when Israeli helicopters fired missiles at a car in the Zeitoun neighbourhood of Gaza City, witnesses said. Two members of Hamas’ military wing were killed.
President George Bush and the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, joined a chorus of condemnation of the suicide bombing. But the primary concern of the White House was to ensure that neither the assassination attempt against Abdel-Aziz al-Rantissi on Tuesday, nor the latest terrorist attack, derails the US-led ”road map” to peace launched by Bush at a Middle East summit last week.
However, Israel’s prime minister, Ariel Sharon, remained defiant in the face of escalating violence that has left 22 Palestinians and 21 Israelis dead in the week since the Aqaba summit. ”Israel will continue to pursue the terrorists and those that send them,” he said.
The South African government, meanwhile, said it could ”only but reiterate its absolute condemnation of Israel’s policy of extra-judicial killings”.
”The international community will not tolerate the assassination of the senior civilian leadership in the Palestinian community. The South African Government has repeatedly stressed that such actions only lead to retaliation and retribution by an oppressed people.”
The South African government said they were, at the same time, horrified and deeply saddened by Wednesday’s suicide bus bombing.
In Jerusalem, the suicide bomber boarded the rush-hour bus on one of the city’s busiest streets and detonated his explosives at the next stop.
The bomber was identified as an 18-year-old high school student, Abdel Madi Shabneh.
”The force threw me on to the ground,” said Yonathon Menachem, who was standing across the street from the blast. ”Then I felt these wet patches on my shirt. It was terrible. I was pulling someone’s flesh off my clothes.”
The former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky, now Israel’s minister for Jerusalem affairs, was visibly upset as he looked at the bus. ”My daughter rides that bus, so immediately you start checking where your family is, and getting irritated because one doesn’t know.”
Hamas claimed responsibility for the bombing. It was ”a message to all the Zionist criminals that the Palestinian fighters are capable of reaching them everywhere”.
Israeli officials attempted to deny any link between the assassination attempt on Dr Rantissi and the suicide bombing by saying that it takes days for Hamas to organise such attacks.
Bush was visibly angry as he condemned the bus bombing and urged all states to ”isolate those who hate so much they are willing to kill”.
Arafat also swiftly criticised the bombing. ”I strongly condemn this terrorist attack that targeted Israeli civilians today in Jerusalem,” he said in a televised address. ”I also condemn the [Israeli] operations that took place in Gaza, and other operations in which Palestinian civilians were killed and wounded.”
Whether the bus bombing knocks the US-led road map off course or strengthens the determination of the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships to make it work is largely in Sharon’s hands.
The Israeli delegation to last week’s summit with Bush in Jordan said it would not allow the process to be held hostage by suicide bombers, and that it was prepared to ”suffer some blows” while the new Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, asserts his authority and control.
Abbas called for both parties ”to immediately move into a serious implementation of the road map”.
The bombing followed 24 hours in which the Israeli government scrambled to justify the attempted assassination of Rantissi in the face of stiff criticism from the US.
When pressed about the timing of the attack, Israeli officials tried to persuade the Americans that Rantissi posed an immediate threat, by saying he is ”a bomb factory.”
Sharon told a local newspaper that he had nothing to apologise for. ”I told Bush and Abu Mazen that I am willing to walk a long path of compromise-making for the sake of a settlement, but on one issue there will be no compromises — harm to Israelis,” he said.
The SA government statement continues: ”No act of violence, which claims the lives of innocent civilians, has ever led to the resolution of a conflict. In this vein the Government condemns all acts that threaten the lives of civilians.”
The government called on all parties to act with restraint and resilience in pursuing peace.
”The latest attacks in Gaza and Jerusalem represent another attempt by extremist forces to derail the peace process, as they come at a time when the Israelis and the Palestinians have committed themselves to implementing the Road Map.”
The South African government reiterated its support for the Road Map as the only viable way to achieve a lasting settlement.
It urged both parties to persist, in spite of difficulties, in implementing the provisions of the Road Map. – Guardian Unlimited Â