You kill one. We kill 10. You kill 10, we kill 100. You kill a 10 year old, we kill two 5 year olds.
This should put to rest the so-called philosophy of the israeli govt that suicide bombers can be eradicated by installing apartheid, and fencing the population in like animals, and by demolishing their homes and killing children and making families homeless. Repressive policies lead to desperate measures. Eradication of that repression leads to eradication of those desperate measures. But well, this philosophy is lost on some.
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) - A suicide bomber blew himself up on a crowded bus in downtown Tel Aviv on Thursday, killing at least five other people and wounding 49 in the second such attack in two days.
The blast went off during lunch hour while the bus was driving on Allenby Street, in the heart of a crowded restaurant and business district. One witness said he saw bodies being hurled from the bus. “There were arms and legs on the ground. It was a horror,” said Shmuel Salomon, who owns a restaurant in the area.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility, though various Israeli media outlets reported conflicting claims by the militant Palestinian groups Islamic Jihad and Hamas.
A spokesman for the Islamic militant group Hamas, Abdel Aziz Rantisi, said he did not know who was behind the attack but welcomed it. “The Zionists are paying for the crimes and terrorism of their leaders and they should know that we are the real owners of this land and we would never give it up,” he said.
Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for Wednesday’s attack, in which a suicide bomber blew himself at a bus stop in northern Israel, killing an Israeli policeman.
Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer met with army commanders on how to respond. Israeli troops already occupy most Palestinian towns in the West Bank and confine hundreds of thousands of residents their to their homes to try to keep militants out of Israel.
However, troops lifted the curfew in the town of Jenin for several hours on Tuesday for the first time in weeks, and there was some speculation that the recent days attackers may have come from the town, a hotbed of militants.
Before this week, there had been no suicide bombings in Israel since Aug. 4.
Thursday’s explosion went off just after 1 p.m., outside one of the major synagogues in Tel Aviv, across the street from a Starbucks coffee shop and a block away from the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange.
A witness, who only gave her first name, Sarit, said she saw a large cloud of smoke. “People came out to help with first aid. We’re trying to give them water. We saw the front of the bus and it apparently caught on fire,” she told Israel Army Radio.
The blast scorched the bus and blew out its windows. One man with blood over his bare chest was wheeled away by paramedics. Another man sat on the sidewalk, crying. Religious volunteers in white overalls later searched the area, picking bits of flesh and placing them into plastic bags. Jewish law requires burial of the entire body.
David Baker, an official in Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ( news - web sites)'s office, said Palestinian militants are waging war against Israeli civilians. “The Palestinians have jumped on the terror bandwagon and are keen on unleashing murderous deeds at any and every opportunity,” he said.
Mark Sofer, an official in the Israeli Foreign Ministry, held the Palestinian Authority ( news - web sites) responsible, saying it had done nothing to rein in militants.
Palestinian Authority officials were not immediately available for comment.
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat ( news - web sites) has condemned attacks on Israeli civilians — most recently in a speech to parliament last week — though Israel accuses him of doing little to prevent them. The Palestinians say Israel’s military strikes have rendered their security services powerless against the militants.
Allenby Street has previously been targeted by Palestinian militants. On March 30, a suicide bomber from the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a militia linked to Arafat’s Fatah ( news - web sites) movement, walked into a cafe on Allenby Street and blew himself up, killing one woman and wounding 30 people.
