Car Blows Up Next to Bus in Northern Israel; Kills 8, Injures 40+October 21, 2002
by Matti Stein
KARKUR JUNCTION, Israel (Reuters) - Palestinian suicide bombers detonated a car packed with explosives next to a bus in northern Israel Monday, killing at least eight people and injuring more than 40, police said.
The explosion -- which cast a shadow over a U.S. peace mission due to begin later this week -- turned the bus traveling between the cities of Hadera and Afula into a blazing inferno of screams and burned bodies.
The blast sent a mushroom cloud billowing in the sky and stoked flames so hot that ammunition carried by soldiers riding on the bus blew up in a chain of explosions and the vehicle was reduced to a blackened skeleton.
"There were explosions non-stop," said Michael Yitzhaki, a passenger who escaped. "The flames ate up the bus with amazing speed...We didn't manage to get inside to save anyone. It was pretty difficult watching people who we couldn't help anymore."
Using a tactic rarely applied during the two-year-old Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation, police said two Palestinians pulled up to the rear of the bus while it was picking up passengers and set off their load of explosives.
A few passengers managed to escape, some of them by crawling from the windows, but others were trapped inside and burned to death.
The militant Palestinian Islamist group Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the bombing, Hizbollah's al-Manar television station said.
Islamic Jihad was behind a similar car bombing against a bus at Megiddo Junction in northern Israel last June in which 17 people were killed.
David Baker, an official in Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's office, held Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority responsible for the attack, an accusation the Palestinian leader's aides have always denied.
Arafat condemned the bombing.
"You know that the decision of the Palestinian leadership is that it is opposed to attacks against Palestinian and Israeli civilians. We reject such attacks against civilians," Arafat told reporters outside his headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
SPECTRE OF ISRAELI RETALIATION
It was the first Palestinian bombing in Israel since October 10 when a suicide bomber blew up at a bus stop near Tel Aviv, killing himself and an elderly woman. The attack near the town of Pardes Hanna, about 30 miles north of Tel Aviv, raised the specter of a harsh Israeli military response despite Washington's appeals for calm as it seeks Arab support for a possible U.S.-led war on Iraq.
"It was like an earthquake. The whole bus is burned and nothing is left of it," Meital Ziskin, a witness, told Israeli television.
"I was 60 meters from the bus station...and I heard an explosion. The bus was completely shattered. I saw the bus go up in flames. It was completely wrecked," a witness told Israel Radio.
Another man, Reuven Oren, told Army radio: "It created a black mushroom cloud. It was huge."
Israeli security sources said last week that Palestinians, waging a two-year-old uprising for statehood, were planning to carry out some 20 attacks in Israel soon.
"Palestinian terrorists are waging war in Israel's streets, cafes and on our roads," Baker told Reuters.
"The Palestinian Authority has become a prime authority on terror and could not care less about preventing it," he said.
Palestinian officials have consistently denied responsibility for such attacks and have accused Israel of provoking violence with its reoccupation of Palestinian-ruled areas and killings of Palestinian civilians.
HEBRON PULLBACK DELAYED
Earlier Monday, Israeli forces postponed until later this week a limited pullback in the West Bank city of Hebron seen as a goodwill gesture coinciding with a U.S. peace mission, Israeli security sources said.
Violence flared in the Gaza Strip, where the Israeli army said it killed two armed Palestinians in a gun battle near the Jewish settlement of Kfar Darom.
U.S. envoy William Burns, on a Middle East tour that will bring him to Israel in mid-week, was expected to ask both sides to take steps to instill calm while Washington seeks to shore up Arab support for a possible U.S.-led war on Iraq.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's room to maneuver appeared limited, however, as cracks developed in his ruling coalition over the dismantling of a rogue Jewish settlers' outpost in the West Bank.
Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, under fire from the religious right-wing ministers in the cabinet for ordering the removal of the hilltop outpost, threatened to resign and pull his center-left Labor Party out of the government.
But political commentators saw it as an empty threat, saying Ben-Eliezer was unlikely to relinquish his high-profile defense post ahead of a party leadership election next month.
They also said a voter shift to the right in Israel since a Palestinian uprising for statehood began two years ago left Labor reluctant to test its popularity in a national ballot.
At least 1,625 Palestinians and 611 Israelis have been killed since the Palestinian uprising began in September 2000 after peace talks on a Palestinian state foundered.
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