Blast in Israeli city kills at least six


West Bank \|Reuters \| 18-07-2002 An explosion presumed to be the work of Palestinian militants rocked a street in Tel Aviv yesterday night, killing at least six people, Israeli police said. Medics spoke of a number of further injured. Government spokesman Raanan Gissin said there appeared to have been "a suicide bomber plus an (separate) explosive charge". Tel Aviv police chief Yossi Sedbon told Israel's Channel One television: "There were two suicide bombers." Earlier Israel had postponed talks with the Palestinians a day after a bloody attack that killed seven Israeli civilians near the settlement of Emmanuel, shattering a lull in hostilities. Israeli troops clashed with gunmen presumed to be the Palestinian militants who had planted a roadside bomb next to a bus on Tuesfay and then sprayed automatic weapons fire at surviving passengers. An Israeli officer and one of the militants were killed in the exchange. Backed by helicopters, troops fanned across West Bank hills in search of the other gunmen behind the attack. In addition, an Israeli warplane fired a missile into a building in the central Gaza Strip which Palestinians said was a metal foundry and the army said was used by the militant Hamas group to produce mortar rounds and rockets. The building was flattened in the air strike but there were no reports of casualties. The latest attacks are a severe setback for the army, which has reoccupied seven of eight West Bank cities for nearly a month. Israeli forces also killed a militant from the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed group linked to Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction, in an exchange of fire in a northern West Bank village, Palestinian and Israeli sources said. Israeli military officials said the army had received advance intelligence information about an attack being planned from the village, which they said had often served as a way-station for suicide bombers trying to infiltrate Israel. Emotions were high in Israel after the bus ambush and angry settlers charged that the government had failed to protect them. Front-page newspaper reports told how passengers made desperate cellular telephone calls for help while trapped inside the armoured bus, halted by a roadside bomb near the ultra-Orthodox Jewish settlement of Emmanuel. The gunmen, firing through unprotected windows and the roof, sprayed passengers with automatic weapons fire for 15 minutes, survivors said. Most of the dead were settlers. "There's been a terrorist attack, but I'm all right," the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper quoted Yonatan Gamliel, 16, as saying in a phone call from the bus to his parents. He was shot dead minutes later. In hospital, a baby born prematurely to a woman wounded in the ambush died hours after being delivered by emergency caesarean section. Inside Emmanuel, mourners dressed in the traditional black garb of devout Jews gathered for a funeral procession and accused the Israeli government of forsaking them. The Palestinian Authority said it condemned the attack "in accordance with its policies that reject targeting civilians, Israelis or Palestinians". Some 200,000 Jewish settlers live in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, land Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war and on which Palestinians want to build a state. The settlers claim a biblical birthright to the region but their communities are widely regarded abroad as illegal and a key obstacle to Israeli-Palestinian peace. U.S. President George W. Bush played down differences with his Middle East peace partners over Yasser Arafat's future, saying the Palestinian leader was no longer the issue. The United States failed on Tuesday to win its European and Arab allies over to a strategy based on ostracising Arafat as a primary precondition for progress toward peace. "Mr Arafat would like the whole issue to be about him. That's the way it has been in the past, except when you analyse his record he has failed the Palestinian people. He just has and that's reality," Bush told reporters. At the scene of the ambush on Wednesday, Israeli Defence Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer told reporters that Israeli troops killed one gunman in a dawn gunfight and another was on the run. He said the attackers belonged to Hamas. Tuesday's attack, echoing a Palestinian ambush on a bus in almost the same spot that killed 11 people in December, had an immediate impact on efforts to revive moribund peacemaking. Israel held its first high-level talks with Palestinians in four months last week, after the Palestinian Authority announced a reform plan under international pressure to stamp out militant attacks on Israelis as a condition for fresh talks on statehood. But Israel has now twice cancelled follow-up meetings set for this week, highlighting the mistrust hindering a revival of peace efforts after prolonged conflict marked by Palestinian suicide bombings and destructive Israeli incursions.