Israel released hundreds of Palestinian prisoners as part of a deal with Hezbollah on Thursday just hours after a suicide bomber killed 10 other people when he blew himself up aboard a bus close to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s official residence.
The blast tore the bus apart at about 9am local time, shortly before Israeli army officials who had travelled to Germany identified the bodies of three soldiers abducted by Hezbollah, triggering the release of more than 400 Palestinians as well as about 30 Arab prisoners.
Police said the body of the suicide bomber, a member of the hardline Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, was among 10 recovered at the site of the blast. Another victim later died of injuries in hospital, medical sources said.
A medical official said 48 people had been admitted to hospital, of whom 13 were in serious condition.
“This was a very strong and large device. If you look at the bus it has just completely gone,” national police spokesperson Gil Kleiman said. “Bits of the roof were found on the roof of a two-storey building and there were body parts thrown in people’s homes.”
“People were thrown out of the bus. They flew very far through the windows or the roof,” Eli Beer, head of the religious response force for the Magen David Adom rescue service, said at the scene.
“The bus was full but not packed. There were a lot of heavy injuries. A lot of people were badly hurt with missing limbs.”
Part of the roof of the green number-19 bus was ripped off and most of the rear portion reduced to a skeleton by the force of the explosion.
Sharon was not in his house at the time of the blast and was thought to be staying on his ranch in the southern Negev desert.
The premier’s chief spokesperson, Raanan Gissin, said the attack highlighted the necessity of Israel’s controversial West Bank separation barrier whose legality is to be judged by the International Court of Justice next month.
“This terrorist attack is the best argument that we can use to defend the sacred right of Israel to exercise legitimate self-defense,” the spokesperson said.
“No institution or country can give us lessons in morality in regard to the fence after the scenes of horror in Jerusalem,” he added.
The Israeli government decided late on Wednesday to argue that the court has no right to rule on its legality when hearings begin on February 23.
The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed offshoot of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement, claimed responsibility for Thursday’s suicide bus bombing in a phone call to AFP.
The attack was carried out by Ali Munir Yussef Jihara, a 24-year-old policeman from the Ayda refugee camp in the Bethlehem region, the group said.
He was the nephew of Jihad Jihara, one of 13 Palestinians expelled to European countries after a siege at Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity in May 2002.
Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qorei condemned the attack while also criticising “the violence directed against our people” such as the killing of eight Palestinians in an Israeli raid on Wednesday in the Gaza Strip.
“The prime minister condemns the continuation of the cycle of assassinations, liquidations and attacks targeting cvilians on both sides,” he said in a statement.
United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan said that the Middle East peace process was “in distress but not dead” following the blast.
“We need to encourage and find ways of ending this cycle of violence, revenge and attacks as we’ve seen today,” he told a news conference in Brussels.
The latest attack brought the overall death toll since the start of the Palestinian uprising in September 2000 to at least 3Â 726, most of them Palestinians.
Officials were quick to declare that the attack would not derail the exchange deal which began a little more than three hours after the bombing.
The first batch of 130 prisoners walked to freedom after passing through a military checkpoint near the northern West Bank town of Tulkarem, where they were met by local governor Ezzedine Al-Sherif.
The prisoners were also being released at four other checkpoints between Israel and the Palestinian territories, where they were met by families carrying their portraits as well as yellow Hezbollah flags.
Dozens of the freed prisoners headed to Arafat’s office ahead of a meeting with the veteran Palestinian leader.
The green light for the releases came after Israel formally identified the bodies of three of its soldiers who had been abducted by Hezbollah on the Israeli-Lebanese border in October 2000.
After the identification process at a military base near the western German city of Cologne, about 30 Arab prisoners were also released on the runway and the bodies of about 60 Hezbollah fighters were taken across Israel’s northern bordr for return to Lebanon.
An Israeli businessman, Elhanan Tannenbaum, abducted by Hezbollah, was also released in Cologne under the terms of the German-brokered deal.
Tannenbaum and the remains of the three soldiers were later heading for Tel Aviv while the Arab prisoners, including 23 Lebanese, were being flown to Beirut. — AFP
‘It’s a nightmare’