Checkpoint bomb near Jerusalem kills 2 and wounds 19

1.00pm

QALANDIYA, West Bank - A bomb exploded between two Israeli army checkpoints on a busy road outside Jerusalem on Wednesday, killing two Palestinians and wounding 19 people in the first such attack for six months.

Militants within Palestinian President Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement claimed responsibility and apologised for the Palestinian casualties, saying their target had been Israeli security forces at the adjacent Qalandiya and A-Ram checkpoints.

Israeli police spokesman Gil Kleiman said the bomb was destined for downtown Jerusalem and that it was apparently detonated by remote control by a militant who left it in a bag beside a car and fled when he saw policemen approaching.

The blast raised the prospect of a harsh Israeli army response. After nightfall, Israeli forces sealed off the northern West Bank city of Jenin, suspected source of the bomb, with a dozen tanks poised outside for a major raid.

The explosion occurred during a search by Israeli border police after a security alert was declared, Kleiman said.

Palestinian medics based in Ramallah said two Palestinians were killed. One was named as 56-year-old Salah Abu Sneinah, who died at the wheel of his car, while the other was not identified.

"Where's my dad? Where's my dad? My dad, my love!!" Naheda Abu Sneinah, 15, Abu Sneinah's daughter who was in the car with him, screamed in grief inside the Ramallah hospital where his body was taken.

Thirteen Palestinians were wounded including Abu Sneinah's 4-year-old nephew who was in critical condition. Six Israeli border policemen were wounded, three seriously.

The blast occurred near a taxi stand between the barbed-wire checkpoints where thousands of Palestinians queue daily for identity checks on a main road between Jerusalem and the nearby West Bank city of Ramallah, Arafat's headquarters.

Palestinian militants have carried out scores of suicide and ambush attacks on Israelis during an uprising launched almost four years ago in the West Bank and Gaza, territories Israel occupied in the 1967 Middle East war.

The two lands are honeycombed with Israeli army roadblocks that have crippled Palestinian transport and trade. Israel says the checkpoints serve to neutralise militants. Palestinians call them a form of collective punishment that breeds violence.

The checkpoint bomb broke a lull in militant attacks in the Jerusalem area since February, when a suicide bomber killed eight people aboard a Jerusalem municipal bus.

Militant attacks inside Israel have abated this year. Israel says this follows Israeli killings of many cell commanders in raids, better intelligence tipoffs used to intercept militants en route, and Israel's partially built West Bank barrier.

But violence has surged in parts of the territories, especially Gaza where militants seek to portray Israel's plan to evacuate Jewish settlers in 2005 as a victory. Israel is bent on preventing that by smashing Palestinian armed factions first.

Zekariya Zubeidi, the 25-year-old commander of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades in Jenin, said al-Aqsa militants had brought a car packed with explosives to the high-security roadblock zone on Jerusalem's northern fringes.

"We consider the Palestinians killed to be martyrs. We are sorry for the casualties on our own side. The target was the checkpoints," he told Reuters by telephone.

Ghassan al-Khatib, a senior Palestinian cabinet minister, bemoaned the bomb blast but said such attacks were "unfortunately inevitable" until Israel gave Palestinians hope of statehood in the West Bank and Gaza via negotiations.

Israel rules that out until Palestinian authorities subdue militant groups. Its unilateral plan for "disengagement" from Gaza also entails keeping major West Bank settlements, which Palestinians fear will deny them land needed for a viable state.

In pre-dawn violence in the Gaza Strip, an Israeli helicopter fired a missile into the Khan Younis refugee camp, wounding 15 people as gunmen confronted an Israeli force demolishing Palestinian homes near a Jewish settlement.

- REUTERS