Suicide bombing outside Israeli mall tests Mideast truce

by **blessedayers** on Wed Jul 13, 2005 5:18 am

BY JOEL GREENBERG 
 
Chicago Tribune 
 
<a href="http://www.centredaily.com/mld/centredaily/news/world/12117608.htm">www.centredaily.com/mld/c...117608.htm</a> 
 
JERUSALEM - (KRT) - A Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up Tuesday near a shopping mall in the Israeli coastal city of Netanya, killing three other people and wounding more than 30, shortly after an attempted car bombing at a Jewish settlement in the West Bank. 
 
The militant group Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for both attacks, which shook a fragile truce. 
 
The Netanya blast was the second suicide bombing in Israel since a cease-fire was declared in February by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. 
 
Violence has dropped sharply since the truce was announced, but the relative calm has been broken periodically by shootings and mortar attacks by Palestinian militants, and by lethal Israeli army raids targeting fugitives. 
 
Tuesday's attacks seriously tested the truce, but it seemed unlikely to collapse. 
 
Both Israel and the Palestinian Authority have a strong interest in maintaining quiet to allow a smooth withdrawal of Israeli settlers and soldiers from the Gaza Strip, planned to begin next month. 
 
Israeli and Palestinian officials said the suicide bombing was an attempt to sabotage the pullout. 
 
Abbas called it "a terrorist attack" and "a crime against the Palestinian people" whose perpetrators must be punished. He ordered the Palestinian security forces to track down and prosecute those behind the attacks, his office said. 
 
"There is no rational Palestinian who can do such a thing on the eve of the Israeli withdrawal," Abbas added. He called a meeting with Palestinian factions to ensure compliance with the cease-fire. 
 
Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz canceled a planned meeting on the Gaza pullout with a Palestinian Cabinet minister and a U.S. envoy and met instead with security officials. 
 
Israel Radio reported later that officials decided to ban all movement by Palestinians out of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and to step up military action against Islamic Jihad. 
 
Militant Palestinian factions agreed in talks with Abbas in March to observe an informal cease-fire through the end of the year. 
 
However, spokesmen for Islamic Jihad said Tuesday's attacks were a response to continuing Israeli violations of the truce, which they said included killings of militants and the construction of a separation barrier in Jerusalem that will leave tens of thousands of Palestinian residents cut off from the city. 
 
"We reiterate our commitment to the calm, but we have to retaliate for Israeli violations," Ahmed Abu Khalil, the 18-year-old suicide bomber from a village near the West Bank town of Tulkarem, said in a farewell video. 
 
An Israeli army spokeswoman said Tuesday's attacks were organized by the same Islamic Jihad network in the Tulkarem area that orchestrated the last suicide bombing in Israel, an explosion outside a Tel Aviv nightclub on Feb. 25 that killed five people. The spokeswoman said the cell was acting on orders of the Islamic Jihad leadership in Damascus, Syria. 
 
The suicide bomber in Netanya struck at a busy intersection near the Sharon Mall, detonating about 20 pounds of explosives packed with nails and ball bearings on a pedestrian crosswalk, police said. 
 
Two women were killed and a third died several hours later of her wounds. Three of the wounded were in serious condition, and a child was badly burned, hospitals reported. 
 
The blast scattered body parts and pieces of clothing across the road. 
 
"The place was like a battlefield," said Doron Shafir, a paramedic who was one of the first at the scene. "Complete silence, no traffic, no one moving." 
 
One woman's clothes were on fire. "Her handbag was burning," Shafir said. "She was sitting there in a daze and didn't know what had happened." 
 
Located only nine miles from the West Bank in the narrowest part of Israel, Netanya had been the target of repeated suicide bombings in recent years until the completion of the northern section of a barrier Israel is building in the West Bank to block such attacks. 
 
Israeli investigators were trying to determine whether the bomber who reached the city Tuesday passed through a checkpoint at one of the gates in the barrier, or traveled south and crossed into Israel in an area where the barrier is not yet complete. 
 
Half an hour before the Netanya bombing, explosives blew up in a pickup truck in the Israeli settlement of Shavei Shomron in the northern West Bank, but they failed to ignite gas canisters inside, the army said. 
 
The truck bomb, rigged in a stolen Israeli vehicle, was driven into the settlement when the front gate was opened to allow another car out, according to reports from the scene. 
 
An Israeli army spokeswoman said the driver, who was wounded in the explosion, was an accused informer for the Israelis and was found handcuffed to the steering wheel. The explosives were activated remotely by cell phone, the spokeswoman said. 
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© 2005, Chicago Tribune. 
 
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Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services. 
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"Seek ye out of the book of the LORD,and read: no one of these shall fail...Therefore every scribe instructed concerning the kingdom of heaven is like a householder who brings out of his treasure things old and new...Preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all long suffering and doctrine.” Isa.34:16a, Matt.13:52, 2Tim 4:2 
 
"A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed." 
John R. W. Stott 
 
Pro 21:28 A false witness shall perish; but the man that obeyeth shall speak unchallenged. 
 
Jody ***Psalms 119***

by **beelbill** on Wed Jul 13, 2005 6:20 am

Newspeak definition: 
Palastinian cease fire/truce: we keep killing you but no one notices. If you retaliate, then you have broken the truce.

Suicide bombing outside Israeli mall tests Mideast truce

Suicide bombing outside Israeli mall tests Mideast truce

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