Lunch-time bomber kills five in Tel Aviv

A PALESTINIAN suicide bomber blew himself up on a crowded bus as it drove along a busy Tel Aviv street at lunch-time today, killing at least five other people and wounding 49.

It was the second suicide bombing in two days after a six week lull.

The shrapnel-studded explosives tore through the bus on Allenby Street while it was passing through the heart of a teeming restaurant and business district.

The driver, his body blackened, slumped at the wheel. Passengers jumped out of shattered windows.

“People were yelling, ‘take us out of here,”’ said a witness, Herzl Ben-Moshe, who rushed to the bus to help rescue passengers.

There was no claim of responsibility, though Israeli media reported conflicting claims by the militant Palestinian groups Islamic Jihad and Hamas.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon called his full Cabinet into special session for the first time since March, when a large-scale incursion into the West Bank was approved.

Before the session, Defence Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer briefly toured the bombing scene and consulted with army commanders on how to respond.

The bomb was detonated just after 1 pm, 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.

Ben-Moshe, a store owner, said he saw several people lying on the floor of the bus, including one man whose legs had been blown off.

“People were hurting, screaming, wounded. We saw pieces of people,” said Zohara Pillo, 27, a visitor from Haifa. “The driver was sitting in his seat and his hands were on the window and he was dead, he was all blackened.”

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 pavement, 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.

Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority said it condemns all attacks on civilians, Israeli or Palestinian. Before this week, there had been no suicide bombings in Israel since August 4. The renewed attacks came a day after Israel rejected a Palestinian proposal for a two-stage truce.

After blast, Hamas spokesman Ismail Abu Shanab said he expected to see “a series of operations against the Zionist enemy, as a result of the daily brutal crimes against our people.” He stopped short of claiming responsibility.

Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for Wednesday’s attack, in which a suicide bomber blew himself at a bus stop in northern Israel, killing a policeman.

Israeli troops already occupy most Palestinian towns in the West Bank and confine hundreds of thousands of residents to their homes daily 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 in recent days attackers may have come from the town, a hotbed of militants.

In Washington, President George Bush said he strongly condemned the back-to-back suicide bombings: “And we continue to send our message to the good people of that region that if you’re interested in peace, if you want people to grow up in a peaceful world, all parties must do everything they can to reject and stop violence.”

Mark Sofer, an official in the Israeli Foreign Ministry, said that “once again, the utter bestiality of Palestinian terrorists has reared its ugly head on a bus in Tel Aviv.” He held the Palestinian Authority responsible, saying it had done nothing to rein in militants.

The Palestinian Authority said that the Tel Aviv attack was “totally against the Palestinian national interest, and it gives Sharon’s government and his occupation army the pretext to continue killing, to continue the siege and to continue settlement activities.”

In other violence yesterday, a 12-year-old Palestinian boy was killed in the West Bank town of Ramallah when he broke an Israeli curfew to buy cigarettes for his father. Witnesses said he was shot by Israeli soldiers. The army said it was checking the death.

In Abu Dis, a West Bank suburb of Jerusalem, Israeli bulldozers razed the family homes of two Palestinians who blew themselves up in Jerusalem in December, killing 11 bystanders.