Islamic Jihad to step up attacks

Islamic Jihad is to step up attacks in Israel as a show of support for Iraq, the militant group said today, a day after dispatching a suicide bomber who wounded 49 Israelis outside a packed cafe.

Yesterday’s blast in the coastal town of Netanya appeared to have thrust both Israelis and Palestinians closer to the war in Iraq, with both making the connection to that conflict after largely watching it from the sidelines.

Islamic Jihad said the Netanya bombing was “Palestine’s gift to the heroic people of Iraq,” and that there would be more attacks.

Israeli officials said they were braced for a new wave of bombings.

Yesterday’s blast was one of dozens carried out by Islamic Jihad and the larger Hamas group in the past 30 months of Israeli-Palestinian fighting, but the first since the start of the US-led offensive against Iraq on March 20.

Israeli and Palestinian commentators drew parallels between the explosion and the first suicide bombing of the Iraq war a day earlier, when an Iraqi officer driving a taxi blew himself up near US troops, killing four.

Military analyst Roni Shaked wrote in the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot newspaper that the Iraqis seemed to be copying the tactics of Palestinian militants.

“It is only a question of time before the culture of suicide in Basra and Baghdad – exactly as in Gaza and Nablus – becomes an inseparable part of the war,” he wrote.

Islamic Jihad said it has dispatched several dozen Palestinian volunteers from Arab countries to Baghdad to carry out suicide missions against American and British soldiers.

“It’s not a large number of fighters, just symbolic,” said a spokesman.