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Bus bombing kills 10 in Jerusalem
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James Bennet/NYT
Friday, January 30, 2004
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JERUSALEM A Palestinian suicide bomber killed himself and 10 others aboard a crowded city bus here Thursday morning. Despite the attack, Israel proceeded with a planned prisoner exchange with the Lebanese guerrilla group Hezbollah.
The explosive, packed with shrapnel, wounded more than 45 people only steps from the prime minister’s official residence at the edge of central Jerusalem. It was the deadliest Palestinian attack in almost four months.
Within fours hours, and with what one Israeli spokesman called ‘‘heavy hearts,’’ Israeli officials went ahead with the planned release of 400 Palestinian prisoners across five checkpoints into the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Israel also released 29 other men, most of them Lebanese, in a German-mediated deal that returned to Israel a businessmen kidnapped by Hezbollah and the remains of three soldiers ambushed by the group while the soldiers were on patrol in October 2000.
It was a rare, delicate exchange, negotiated over years, between enemies who do not officially recognize each other.
Scenes of jubilation in Lebanon contrasted with a somber ceremony Thursday evening at Ben Gurion International Airport to receive the soldiers’ remains.
The businessman, Elhanan Tannenbaum, was whisked out of public view for medical examination and questioning by Israeli security.
For Israelis, it was a split-screen day of conflicting emotions, as images of a shattered bus and broken bodies unspooled side-by-side with images of the soldiers’ wooden coffins and smiling Arab prisoners flashing victory signs as they went free.
The bomb tore the back third off the roof of a green-and-white No. 19 bus as it climbed Gaza Street in the wealthy Rehavia neighborhood.
The suicide bombing, the first in Jerusalem since September and the first in any Israeli city since Dec. 25, was claimed by the Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, a violent offshoot of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction. It identified the bomber as Ali Muneer Jaara, a Palestinian policeman from a refugee camp in Bethlehem, just south of Jerusalem.
Jaara, who was to turn 25 on Friday, left a one-page written note saying he wanted to avenge the deaths of eight Palestinians killed in an Israeli incursion Wednesday into the Gaza Strip. Asking his mother not to cry for him, he wrote, ‘‘Be happy for the wedding of your son the martyr.’’
Meshulam Perlman, 59, was setting up a new plant stand outside his flower shop, Lilac, shortly before 9 a.m. when he saw and felt the explosion at the foot of his street, which intersects Gaza. There was a moment of shocked silence, he said, and then, ‘‘I remember only screaming to get help, to save them.’’
He pointed toward a stain on the pavement a block from the shattered bus. ‘‘I saw a hand that lay on the street, there,’’ he said.
Naim Barazani transferred to the No. 19 bus shortly before the bomber exploded. ‘‘What I remember is that the heads of two old people fell next to me,’’ said Barazani, lying in Bikur Holim hospital with a pink brace around his neck. ‘‘You don’t know what trauma that is — to look, to see those heads coming down, as if they were chicken heads.’’
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was not in the residence at the time of the bombing.
The timing of the attack raised the possibility that rejectionist Palestinians were seeking to block the prisoner exchange and destroy any hint of progress. The bombing came as John Wolf, the Bush administration’s special envoy here, was on his first visit to the region in four months, since previous violence and paralysis in the peace process prompted his return to Washington.
The Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades is a fragmented group, with some cells financed and directed through Hezbollah by Iran, according to Israeli security officials. Yet it was unclear whether the violence reflected a strategy of sowing chaos or simply chaos itself. Some Palestinians in Bethlehem said that Jaara was acting impulsively and on his own.
Israeli security officials say that despite the recent appearance of a relative calm for Israelis, militants have continued to attempt attacks. Since September, Israeli security officials have foiled at least four attempted bombings in Jerusalem, the police say.
Blocking the prisoner release may not have proved unpopular among Palestinians, who generally did not regard it as significant.
None of the freed Palestinians were prominent men and most were due to be released shortly anyway. Israel is holding roughly 6,000 Palestinian prisoners in all.
Yet, particularly after Thursday’s attack, some Israelis criticized the prisoner exchange as a reward for terrorism.
Jonathan Peled, a spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry, defended the exchange as reflecting Israel’s commitment to ‘‘bring all our boys back even if the price we are paying is very high.’’
He said, ‘‘We’re releasing the 400 Palestinians with very heavy hearts, because we know that those Palestinians will very quickly return to the cycle of terrorism.’’
In a statement to the official Palestinian news agency, the Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qurei, condemned the suicide bombing, as well as ‘‘the continued violence against our people.’’
David Baker, an official in Sharon’s office, said the attack was evidence that the governing Palestinian Authority was doing ‘‘absolutely nothing to stop this terror.’’
He said the bombing showed the importance of ‘‘Israel’s security fence,’’ a barrier it is building against West Bank Palestinians. The barrier, a network of fencing, concrete and ditches, is consuming West Bank land, and Palestinians call it a provocation.
Israel has built some fences and dug a deep trench, filled with concertina wire, along Jerusalem’s boundary with Bethlehem. Some Palestinians manage to bypass the trench on foot.
As part of a deal brokered by the Bush administration, Israel permitted armed Palestinian police to begin operating again in Bethlehem last summer. Just Wednesday, Israel allowed uniformed police officers to return to the streets of other West Bank cities, to stem increasing crime.
In Bethlehem, streets emptied Thursday in anticipation of an expected Israeli incursion.
After the bombing, Sharon canceled a meeting planned for Thursday evening between Israeli and Palestinian officials and representatives of donor countries. The group was to discuss how to improve conditions for the Palestinians.
‘‘There is no room for such discussions on this difficult day, where innocent civilians were murdered on the streets of the capital of Israel,’’ Sharon said in a statement with his foreign minister, Silvan Shalom.
Jaara boarded the No. 19 bus carrying about 15 pounds of explosives in a bag, the police said. Bits of metal were packed with the bomb.
Galit Gabai, 29, said she noticed nothing unusual after she caught the bus to ride to her first day of work downtown at a camera repair shop. Then came the blast. ‘‘I saw black before my eyes,’’ she said. ‘‘I heard screaming. Next to me a woman was spread out, with all her organs on the outside.’’
Dror Duga, a 17-year-old high school student, said he was about a block away when he saw the bus explode. ‘‘People flew out of the roof of the bus,’’ he said. ‘‘The street was dead. Then the people in the buildings started screaming. There were pieces of flesh on the ground, hands and a head.’’
As emergency workers gathered corpses and body parts into white plastic bags, the charred body of a man, his head thrown back, his skin a dark gray, still sat in a seat in the wreck. He had no feet and no arms.
Perlman, who runs the flower store, said that people rushed to the scene searching for loved ones. He reassured one man searching for his daughter, who works in a nearby travel agency, and another whose relative turned out to be riding a No. 32 bus.
He said that as he went to help the victims, he saw the lower half of a woman’s torso. ‘‘The socks were brown,’’ he said. ‘‘The shoes were black.’’ He said he had seen similar sights as a soldier fighting Egypt in the Yom Kippur war of 1973.
‘‘But it was soldiers, not civilians,’’ he said. ‘‘It was a war. This is not a war.’’
The New York Times
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