Israeli troops blast Hamas home

GAZA - Israeli troops, backed by 40 tanks and armoured cars, dynamited the home of an Islamic militant in a Gaza village yesterday, Palestinian witnesses said.

The incursion into the coastal strip came after a Palestinian militant blew himself up on a Jerusalem bus on Thursday, killing 11 people, four of them children. The attack was claimed by the Islamic militant Hamas group.

Israeli security sources said Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had ruled out an extensive military operation in response to the bombing and had instructed the Army to carry out "pinpoint" operations against militants.

The suicide bomber who boarded the bus full of schoolchildren and commuters was identified as from the village of El Khader outside the West Bank town of Bethlehem.

Sharon's spokesman, Raianan Gissin, predicted a "long and intensified campaign" in the Bethlehem area, from which the 23-year-old Hamas bomber infiltrated. But he stressed that Israel would not be provoked into the kind of large-scale retaliation that would jeopardise President George W. Bush's campaign against Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

The bombing, the first in Jerusalem in three months, came barely 36 hours after the opposition Labour Party chose the dovish former general Amram Mitzna as its standard-bearer for the January 28 general election. But Gissin insisted that "election politicking stops where terrorism begins".

Hamas, it seems, had no such scruples. The atrocity strikes a devastating blow to Mitzna's chances of persuading an already sceptical public to give peace one more chance.

Israel has been there before. After Yitzhak Rabin's assassination by a Jewish extremist in November 1995, his successor Shimon Peres looked likely to win the general election.

But a season of Hamas bombings in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and the southern port city of Ashkelon in early 1996 tilted the balance to the right-wing Likud party's Benjamin Netanyahu.

A perpetuation of Sharon's mailed-fist policies and boycott of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat is exactly what Hamas needs to fuel its campaign against Israel.

Hanoch Smith, a veteran pollster, summed it up: "I don't think one bombing changes anything, but if there's a whole series during the election campaign, it's going to be even harder. Sharon's in a win-win situation. If the bombings stop, he can say, 'We tamed them'. If they go on, he can say, 'We're hitting the terrorists'."

As witnesses to the latest suicide bombing rushed to the charred remains of bus number 20 on Mexico St, they heard children inside crying for their mothers.

An 8-year-old boy, Ilan Friedman, was on the bus with his 67-year-old grandmother. Both were killed. Two 13-year-old children died. So did 16-year-old Michael Sharansky and his mother. Half of the 49 people wounded were younger than 18, hospital officials said.

Schoolbooks lay in the road beside the remains of the bus, along with sandwiches the children were taking to school. This was the bus you would target if you wanted to kill children. Bus number 20 calls at four schools on its route.

And the time the suicide bomber struck was the time you would choose if you wanted to kill children: 7.15am local time, when they were on their way to school.

One of the children on the bus was Hodaya Asaraf, 13. They buried her yesterday. They put a velvet cloth decorated with the Star of David over her body at the funeral, but you could still see how terribly small it was.

- INDEPENDENT, REUTERS

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