Suicide bomber kills five in Tel Aviv

A suicide bomber blew himself up on a crowded bus a busy Tel Aviv street at lunch-time today, killing at least five other people and wounding 49 in the second such attack in two days.

The bomber detonated his deadly device as the bus was driving on Allenby Street, in the heart of a teeming restaurant and business district.

One witness said he saw bodies being hurled from the bus. “There were arms and legs on the ground. It was a horror,” said restaurateur Shmuel Salomon.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility. Yesterday’s attack, in which a suicide bomber blew himself at a bus stop in northern Israel and also killed an Israeli policeman, was claimed by the militant Islamic Jihad group.

Israeli Defence Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer convened army commanders for consultations on how to respond. Israeli troops already occupy most Palestinian towns in the West Bank and confine hundreds of thousands of residents their to their homes 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 the recent days attackers may have come from the town, a hotbed of militants.

Today’s went off just after 1 pm (1100 Irish time), outside one of the major synagogues in Tel Aviv, across the street from a Starbuck’s coffee shop and a block away from the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange.

A witness, who only gave her first name, Sarit, said she saw a large cloud of smoke.

”People came out to help with first aid. We’re trying to give them water. We saw the front of the bus and it apparently caught on fire,” she said.

The blast scorched the bus and blew out its windows.

One man with blood over his bare chest was wheeled away by paramedics. Another 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.

Mark Sofer, an official in the Israeli Foreign Ministry, said that ”once again, the utter bestiality of Palestinian terrorism has reared its ugly head, on a bus in Tel Aviv.”

Sofer held the Palestinian Authority responsible, saying it had done nothing to rein in militants.

Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat has condemned attacks on Israeli civilians - most recently in a speech to parliament last week - though Israel accuses him of doing little to prevent them. The Palestinians say Israel’s military strikes have rendered their security services powerless against the militants.

A spokesman for the Islamic militant group Hamas, Abdel Aziz Rantisi, said he did not know who was behind the attack but welcomed it.

”The Zionists are paying for the crimes and terrorism of their leaders and they should know that we are the real owners of this land and we would never give it up,” he said.

Allenby Street has previously been targeted by Palestinian militants. On March 30, a suicide bomber from the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a militia linked to Arafat’s Fatah movement, walked into a café on Allenby Street and blew himself up, killing one woman and wounding 30 people.

Before this week, there had been no suicide bombings in Israel since August 4.