Pregnant woman in bus attack loses baby

AHUVA Kopilovitch broke the news to her daughter as she lay in a hospital bed with seven bullet wounds in her torso and legs: the ba

The boy, born by emergency Caesarean section a month premature, became the youngest known victim of more than 21 months of fighting between Israel and the Palestinians.

"We tried to evade the questions," Kopilovitch said yesterday from the hospital where her daughter, Yehudit Weinberg, remained in serious condition. "I hoped that she would stop asking. And then she asked if he had died, and I told her yes."

Eight people including three members of a single family were killed in Tuesday's ambush on a bus near the entrance to the Jewish settlement of Emmanuel in the northern West Bank. Sixteen people remained in hospital yesterday.

Palestinian militants detonated a roadside bomb, then fired on the passengers and threw grenades into the bus. The gunmen escaped, and during a massive manhunt yesterday, a Palestinian gunman and an Israeli army officer were killed.

Kopilovitch, an ultra-Orthodox Jew like most residents of Emmanuel, said she heard about the attack from another daughter, who received a call from Weinberg that she had been injured in an attack and needed an ambulance.

"I heard on the radio there was a shooting on a bus and I knew she was on that bus," she said quietly.

Yehudit Weinberg had just passed a teachers' exam with honours and said goodbye to her lecturers at a seminary in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish city of Bnei Brak when she boarded the bus. She was heading home to the settlement of Emmanuel, where her husband and one-year-old son were waiting. Hours later, her husband bent over her bed in a hospital where several of the injured were taken.

"He is still alive and we will pray for the best," Yehudit told her husband about their newborn son, who lay in a nearby children's hospital.

But the baby died nine hours after he was born. Previously, the youngest known victim of the fighting was a four-month-old Palestinian girl.

For the Shilon family of Emmanuel, the tragedy of Tuesday's attack was multiplied: eight-month-old Tiferet Shilon, her father Gal and grandmother Zilpah Kashi were all killed. Shilon's twin sister, two-year-old brother and mother were wounded.

The mother, Ayelet, had frantically called her husband at home in Emmanuel after the bomb went off beside their bus. "They're shooting at us!" she yelled into the phone. Gal Shilon rushed out of the house and began running to the settlement entrance, unable to find a car. A local gardener picked him up and they sped to the scene where they saw gunmen firing at the bus and its passengers.

The gardener, who had a pistol on him, fired at the Palestinians. They returned fire with automatic rifles, killing Gal Shilon. On the bus, Tiferet and her grandmother were shot and killed.