JERUSALEM - A suicide bombing killed at least five people and wounded about 31 others at a crowded train station in the northern Israeli city of Nahariya last night.
The attack coincided with efforts to arrange a meeting between Palestinian President Yasser Arafat and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres on a possible truce after nearly a year of Israeli-Palestinian violence.
Israeli television channels One and Two said that four or five people, including the bomber, were killed in the blast. Channel Two said 31 were injured.
A spokesman for the Magen David Adom ambulance service could not confirm the number of dead, but said there were fatalities.
"We don't know how many dead. We know that there are dead," said the spokesman, Doron Kotler.
Witnesses reported hearing a huge explosion and seeing smoke rise from the train station in Nahariya, crowded in the morning (local time) with soldiers returning to their bases from leave at the start of the Israeli work week.
The Mediterranean coastal city is on Israel's border with Lebanon and had been a frequent target of Katyusha rocket attacks before Israel's troop pullout from southern Lebanon in May 2000.
"It was a suicide bomber," Yaakov Borovsky, chief of the Israeli police force's northern district, told Israel Radio.
Avi Zohar, another Magen David Adom spokesman, said: "There are about 20 wounded, among them four critically."
A spokesman for the Israel Trains Authority said the bomber blew himself up about 30m from the entrance to the station.
Earlier yesterday Palestinian gunmen shot dead two Israelis in an attack on a van carrying teachers to a school in a Jewish settlement in the West Bank. In the Gaza Strip, Israeli forces killed a Palestinian and wounded another during an attempt to slip into Israel.
- REUTERS
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Suicide bomb attack on train station kills at least five
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