3 dead, 50 hurt in suicide bombing
Palestinian hits market; Israel weighs response
By Dan Ephron, Globe Correspondent, 5/20/2002
JERUSALEM - A Palestinian suicide bomber wearing an Israeli army uniform blew himself up in a vegetable market in the city of Netanya yesterday, killing three people and drowning out talk here of a new peace program and Palestinian political reforms.
Israeli police said they received intelligence about a possible attack an hour before the explosion. Troops set up roadblocks around Netanya, a coastal city that has been scarred by Palestinian violence, but the bomber had already made his way in, officials said.
At least 50 people were wounded in the blast and six were said to be in critical condition. In the West Bank city of Nablus, masked men with loudspeakers claimed responsibility for the attack in the name of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a secular group whose leader, Ahmed Saadat, is being held in a West Bank jail under American and British supervision.
Israeli officials said they were weighing a response. Some analysts speculated Israeli troops would enter overnight into Tulkarem, a West Bank town about 8 miles east of Netanya where Israel says militants have been planning bombings.
''It's another sign that the Palestinian terror campaign against Israelis is continuing,'' government spokesman Gideon Meir said, adding that continuing violence would doom initiatives for jump-starting peace talks, including a regional peace conference.
''We hope that this [conference] will be launched in July but as long as terror continues, I don't think this kind of conference will be able to take off,'' Meir said.
The attacker, who wore the bomb on his body, entered the crowded vegetable market at around 4 p.m. Witnesses said he set off the explosives in the market's main section.
The blast tore up bodies, blew a section of the roof off the market, and knocked over vegetable stands, witnesses said.
A restaurant-owner in the market said rumors spread in the afternoon that a Palestinian assailant was making his way to Netanya, which lies on the Israeli shoreline about 30 minutes north of Tel Aviv.
''Someone came into the restaurant, bought a drink, and said to me that there is a severe warning about an impending attack in the market,'' said Zeev Hollander shortly after the explosion.
''I looked for police but there wasn't an officer around. And then we heard a huge explosion,'' he said.
Palestinians have carried out at least 60 suicide attacks since fighting erupted in the West Bank and Gaza Strip nearly 20 months ago. A bombing in Netanya in late March killed 29 people at a Passover dinner and touched off an unparalleled Israeli offensive in the West Bank that lasted five weeks.
Israeli troops have pulled out of cities they invaded during the assault but they've also made fresh incursions to arrest militants.
The offensive slowed the pace of Palestinian bombings precipitously. In the last suicide attack, two weeks ago, a Palestinian exploded a bomb in a pool hall south of Tel Aviv, killing 15 people.
The following day, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat instructed his security forces to prevent ''all terror attacks against Israeli civilians.'' Yesterday, the Palestinian leadership issued a collective statement declaring its ''full condemnation for the terror attack that targeted Israeli civilians.''
Arafat has faced mounting US and Arab demands to crack down on militants, but he is also under pressure from his own people to focus on government reforms.
In a new twist to the call for reforms, Arafat's entire Cabinet offered to resign, officials said over the weekend, but he rejected the proposal.
Reformers, many of them members of the Palestinian Legislative Council, say that Arafat's 35-member Cabinet is oversized and inefficient. The reformers want to see a new Cabinet and new regional and presidential elections within months.
Though public dissatisfaction with the Palestinian Authority's performance has simmered for years, it burst into the open after Israel's West Bank assault.
''These Cabinet members are nothing but corrupt,'' said Hussam Khader, a Parliament member from Nablus and one of the authority's most outspoken critics. ''They've wrecked Palestinian society from within. It's got to stop.''
Khader said the Cabinet's resignation was a trick aimed at lulling reformers into thinking changes were afoot. It is ludicrous, he said, that some of the authority's biggest offenders had joined the call for reform.
''Where were these people in the past three years when we were begging for new elections?'' he said.
Arafat initially consented to holding new elections but backtracked last week, saying the presence of Israeli troops in Palestinian areas made voting impossible.
Israel has said it will keep its troops in areas previously under Palestinian control until the bombings stop.
Amid the rising tensions, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres of Israel unveiled over the weekend a new version of his peace initiative but said Prime Minister Ariel Sharon opposed it.
The plan calls for restructuring Palestinian security agencies and allowing Palestinians to declare a state immediately in parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip they now control - about 40 percent of the area.
The announcement of a Palestinian state would be followed by a year of negotiations on sticky long-term issues, like the division of Jerusalem and the fate of Jewish settlers in the West Bank.
''I realize that these issues cannot be resolved overnight,'' Peres said.
''I also know that the prime minister doesn't think two years is long enough. But in my eyes it is preferable to immediately begin negotiations rather than to put them off to an unknown date,'' he said.
Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.
This story ran on page A1 of the Boston Globe on 5/20/2002.
© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.