At least five people were killed - two of them suspected suicide bombers - and dozens of people injured in Tel Aviv this evening by two explosions in the downtown area of the city.
The attack occurred in an area near the city's old bus station that is frequented by foreign workers.
"There were two suicide bombers and they are dead," Tel Aviv's police chief, Yossi Sedbon, said on Israeli television. "They carried bags that they detonated. They blew up 15 meters from each other. The explosive charges were not large."
The attacks came at the end of a day in which the Israeli military responded aggressively to a bus ambush that killed seven Israelis near the ultra-Orthodox Jewish settlement of Immanuel in the West Bank on Tuesday.
A young Israeli army officer and a Palestinian gunman died in a running two-hour gun battle early this morning in the rocky hills of the northern West Bank as the army hunted for yesterday's ambushers of an armored bus headed for an ultra-Orthodox Jewish settlement.
As night fell, Israeli tanks and helicopters, guns blazing, swept into Seelat al-Dahr, a Palestinian town between Jenin and Nablus. An army spokesman said the troops were going in to make arrests of what it described as "an extensive terrorist network" preparing suicide bomb attacks. Later reports indicated a suspected militant was killed.
Tuesday's deadly attack on the bus at the entrance to the Immanuel settlement - described by the army as well-planned and well-executed - shattered a nearly month-long period of uneasy calm since Israeli troops moved in force into seven of eight West Bank cities on June 20, following a back-to-back pair of suicide bombings in Jerusalem. The army has imposed strict curfews, keeping more than 700,000 Palestinians confined to their homes, allowed outside only briefly to buy food and medicine a few times a week.
"One thing I will promise you, we will catch them all," Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer pledged, visiting the search scene near Immanuel, as machine gunfire from a helicopter rattled in the background. "We know who they are, and we will lay our hands on those who sent them as well."
But the attack clearly shook Israeli confidence in the military's tactics; a front page headline in the leading newspaper Ha'aretz labled it the "first disaster `' for Lt. Gen Moshe Ya'alon, the new chief of staff.
Until Tuesday, no Israelis had been killed in Palestinian attacks. However, 40 Palestinians, at least 22 of them unarmed civilians according to the Israeli human rights group B'tselem, were killed by soldiers.
The death toll in the bus attack reached eight this morning, as a premature baby, delivered by Caesarean section from his badly wounded mother, 22-year old Yehudit Weinberg, died because she had lost so much blood.
Israeli relief in the army's takeover of the West Bank, which had seemed to promise at least immediate respite from the wave of suicide bombers which had terrorized the country throughout the spring, was undermined by the attack. A squad of Palestinians - believed to number three or four, wearing Israeli army uniforms and wielding military-issue M-16 automatic rifles - set off a roadside bomb several hundred yards from the entrance to Immanuel, then swooped down from hiding places behind the rocks and scrub bushes, firing into the vulnerable roof of the bus and the cracked windows, no longer bulletproof. Worse, the attack was a carbon copy of an ambush on the same spot last Dec. 12 that killed 11 Israelis, and brought an announcement from the Israeli government that it was breaking off contacts with Yasir Arafat. The only difference was, this time bus, No. 189, was armored.
The newspapers and television news today were filled with grisly details: the dead eight-month old premature baby; a 16-year old Yeshiva student fresh from graduating with honors calling his mother on a cellular phone to say he was safe just before he was killed; a family who lost a husband, a grandmother and daughter less than a year old - the husband had rushed out of the settlement in a gardener's truck after getting a cellular phone call from his wife on the bus, only to be shot dead by the assailants in army uniforms.
In the gunbattle today - in a wadi, or valley in the rough terrain between the settlement and Nablus - Israeli Lt. Elad Grenadir, 21, was killed, and three Israeli soldiers were wounded, at least one seriously. There was no immediate identification on the dead Palestinian.
The latest clashes caused Foreign Minister Shimon Peres to cancel a planned meeting with Palestinian officials once again, and came against the background of an inconclusive meeting of "the Quartet" - officials of the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia-in New York looking for a Middle East solution. Increasingly isolated Palestinian officials took heart from the reluctance of the three other members to endorse the United States demand that Mr. Arafat be ousted.
In a sign of further diplomatic maneuvering, a Palestinian official, Nabil Sha'ath hinted to The Associated Press that Mr. Arafat is considering the appointment of a Prime Minister to share the running of day to day affairs. There has been speculation that Mr. Arafat might be sidelined into a ceremonial role as a way out of the impasse.
But Mr. Sha'ath suggested that might happen after a Palestinian state was declared after a January election - both dubious prospects - and, in any case, given the increasingly ramshackle nature of Mr. Arafat's operation, his authority to make such a suggestion was also in doubt. Mr. Arafat's longtime style has been to appoint subordinates beholden to him and play them off against each other.
(China Daily July 18, 2002)
