A suicide bomber detonated an explosive charge at a crowded shopping mall near Tel Aviv on Monday, killing himself and two Israelis. Twenty people were wounded by the blast, including a baby in serious condition, police said. Militants from the Palestinian Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade organization claimed responsibility for the attack.
The body of the bomber remained at the scene long after the blast, and two people wounded in the attack died in hospitals - a woman and a 2-year-old girl.
According to eyewitnesses quoted on Israeli media, the bomber shot a security guard before blowing himself up. The attack took place at an outdoor mall in the center of the city.
A Rescue Services spokesman said 27 people had been taken to area hospitals, and three were in serious condition. Reports of injuries varied, though some claimed 40 or more people were injured in the strike.
A cafe near the center of the blast was reduced to shards of glass and chunks of metal. A baby carriage, its blue fabric stained by blood lay on its side in the midst of the rubble. Volunteers wearing surgical gloves picked over the carriage, searching for fragments of flesh.
An eyewitness who gave his name as Yonatan said he heard an explosion "and there was a lot of smoke." He said he lives next door to the place where the attack took place. He said a large number of police had arrived at the scene.
CLAIM OF RESPONSIBILITY
In a statement to al-Manar television, which belongs to the Hizballah movement in Lebanon, the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade claimed responsibility for Monday's bombing. Al Aqsa is linked to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. The group said it carried out another suicide bombing near Tel Aviv last week.
"I saw the bomber," a woman who gave her name as Ravit told Reuters television, cradling her baby from her hospital bed.
"He was wearing jeans and a grey shirt. He looked weird ... He looked to me for a second like someone who could potentially be a terrorist," she said. But she added she had seen no sign of a bulge under his clothing that could conceal an explosives belt. "Then, after a few seconds, we heard an explosion."
"I saw a baby that had half a regular face, and half a face that was just blood and flesh," said Shai Gat, a 19-year-old soldier who arrived at the scene a few minutes after the attack. "The owner of the nearby photo shop was vomiting and crying. ... There was blood all over the floor."
ARAFAT ACCUSED
Senior Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said Arafat condemned any killings of Israeli and Palestinian civilians, but Israeli Public Security Minister Uzi Landau accused Arafat of responsibility for the bombing. "What we see today is simply an ongoing practice, instigated by the Palestinian Authority led by Arafat, to go out and make our civilians, women and children, deliberate targets," he told reporters.
The bombing appeared to be the latest attempt by Palestinian militants to strike at Israeli civilian targets. In recent weeks, militants have sought to penetrate Israeli areas to detonate charges. Early Friday morning, a Palestinian attacker tried to drive an explosives-laden car into a night club in Tel Aviv, but a security guard shot and killed him first.
In Jerusalem early Monday, police defused a bomb discovered by a gardener outside an apartment building. The explosives had been hidden in a plastic bag.
After a March 27 suicide attack near Tel Aviv that killed 15 and wounded 50, Israel launched a month-long military occupation of Palestinian territories while troops searched for militants. Israeli officials offered no comment on plans to retaliate for Monday's suicide attack.
HUNT FOR MILITANTS
Monday's blast came as Israeli troops hunting suspected militants entered the West Bank city of Bethlehem early Monday - part of what the military said are pinpointed, intelligence-driven raids into Palestinian areas.
Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer warned earlier that there are daily attempts by Palestinians to send suicide attackers into Israel, but most of them are foiled by Israeli forces.
David Baker, an official in the Israeli Prime Minister's office, said, "Palestinian terror continues to strike out at Israeli woman and children." He said Israel would use "all the resources at its disposal" to stop terror attacks.
Dozens of armored vehicles and jeeps drove into Bethlehem and surrounding towns and refugee camps before dawn Monday and imposed a curfew on tens of thousands of Palestinians in the second such incursion over two days. The city had been under Israeli control for nearly six weeks during the previous offensive.
Israeli troops blocked access to Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity, built over Jesus' traditional birth grotto, to prevent another standoff at the shrine with Palestinian gunmen. During "Operation Defensive Shield," Israel's month-long incursion, armed Palestinians fleeing advancing Israeli troops were holed up inside the shrine for 39 days.
PALESTINIAN ARRESTED
In the Dheisheh refugee camp, Israeli troops arrested Ahmed Mughrabi, a local leader of the Martyrs Brigade. Mughrabi is suspected by Israel of having recruiting two suicide bombers in Dheisheh, camp residents said.
In the adjacent town of Beit Sahour, troops commandeered a high-rise building and shut down a local radio station located inside, residents said.
Israeli troops also entered the outskirts of Ramallah in the West Bank, blocking off a road and searching buildings, Palestinians said. Military sources confirmed soldiers were in the area.
In downtown Ramallah, about 2,000 supporters of Arafat's Fatah movement demonstrated for the release of Marwan Barghouti, the Fatah leader in the West Bank who taken into Israeli custody last month. Protesters wore shirts with Barghouti's picture on it while others waved Palestinian flags and posters. A recent poll indicated that Barghouti is the most popular Palestinian leader after Arafat.
Soldiers also remained in the town of Tulkarem and were surrounding another West Bank city, Qalqilya, the army said. A 55-year-old Palestinian was killed in Tulkarem when the army entered the city Sunday, Palestinian witnesses said.
QUICK RAIDS
The rapid incursions are Israel's latest method for targeting militants. "The large number of warnings ... is worrying and requires us to be wound up as tightly as a spring, to be alert everywhere," spokesman Brig. Gen. Ron Kitrey told Israel Army Radio. "The method is to go to precise locations which we have earmarked."
Ben-Eliezer said that despite the warnings, the level of danger to Israel's security posed by Palestinian militants cannot be compared to what it was before Defensive Shield. That operation was triggered by a suicide bombing in an Israeli hotel that killed 29 people at the start of the Jewish Passover holiday.
"I don't believe that we will ... go back to the territories unless the situation becomes intolerable as it was then," Ben-Eliezer said, referring to the Passover bombing. "Then we had no choice."
CIA Director George Tenet, who has organized numerous security meetings in the region, had been planning to head back this week for continued talks, but various reports Monday said he had canceled his plans. That could not be immediately confirmed.
(China Daily May 28, 2002)
