Suicide bombers shatter the calm

JERUSALEM - A Palestinian blew himself up near a police patrol in northern last night in the second suicide bombing in less than 24 hours.

The abortive attack followed a suicide bombing in the seaside town of Netanya yesterday which killed the Palestinian bomber, three Israelis, wounded at least 50 and ended a brief period of relative calm inside Israel.

In the latest attack, a tall Palestinian in jeans and sports shoes tried to get on a bus picking up factory workers at Taanachim Junction in the southern Galilee.

When told it was a private bus, he disembarked but suspicious passengers alerted the police by mobile phone.

The blast occurred when two members of a police patrol asked the man for his identity papers. "He began to move back and then exploded," patrolman Nayef Ghanem told Army radio.

Police believe the bomber was on his way to the nearby town of Afula, a target of previous attacks.

The area is just on the Israeli side of the demarcation line between Israel and the West Bank and 15km from Jenin, a focal point of the military campaign Israel unleashed in the West Bank at the end of March.

That campaign was launched after an attack in a Netanya hotel on March 27 killed 29 people at the beginning of the Jewish Passover holiday.

In yesterday's Netanya attack, the bomber, disguised in an olive green Israeli Army uniform, slipped into the town's produce market despite Israeli security forces in the town being on alert. They had been warned hours earlier that a bomber was planning an attack.

Hours later, Palestinians said several Israeli tanks rolled into part of the West Bank city of Ramallah, where Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's office is headquartered.

An Army spokeswoman said a force including armoured personnel carriers, but no tanks, entered the city after shots were fired at an Israeli motorist travelling to a nearby West Bank settlement. The driver was unhurt.

The troops had withdrawn a short time later, without any contact with Palestinians.

The Netanya bombing overturned stalls of apples, tomatoes and cabbages in a narrow aisle at the open-air market, and also overshadowed political initiatives under discussion in recent days.

Restaurateur Zeev Hollander was serving a customer when he got the first inkling that death was on its way.

"Someone came into the restaurant, bought a drink, and said to me there is a severe warning about an impending attack in the market.

"I looked for police, but there wasn't an officer around. And then we heard a huge explosion."

In the West Bank city of Nablus, armed and masked men claimed responsibility for the attack in the name of the radical Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

The Palestinian leadership declared its "full condemnation for the terror attack that targeted Israeli civilians".

In Washington, United States Vice-President Dick Cheney said: "I think there clearly is a class of bombings" that Arafat cannot rein in.

Violence has been down in May compared with the blood-soaked months of March and April, a development that has given rise to a number of political proposals.

In other developments yesterday:

* Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres outlined a peace plan that held out the possibility of the establishment of a state in areas already under Palestinian control. But it did not win immediate backing from senior leaders on either side.

The plan calls for streamlining of the Palestinian security forces. Israel has pressed for the multiple, overlapping Palestinian security services to be reorganised, with an emphasis on preventing attacks against Israelis.

Palestinian autonomy zones cover two-thirds of the Gaza Strip and islands of territory totalling about 40 per cent of the West Bank.

* The European Union agreed on where to send 13 Palestinian militants exiled under a deal that ended Israel's siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem this month.

The Spanish Foreign Ministry said that Spain and Italy would each take three of the militants, Greece and Ireland would each take two, and Portugal and Belgium, one each. One will remain in Cyprus, hosting the men.

- REUTERS

Feature: Middle East

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