Israel blows up bomber's home in reprisal raid

Israeli forces today blew up the Bethlehem home of the Palestinian policemen who turned suicide bomber and killed ten people in Jerusalem.

Such suicide bombings in the past triggered large-scale military raids, but Israel this time appeared to have decided on a more measured response.

The Bethlehem incursion, the first in six months, was small in scale, and Israel did not clamp a closure on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as it had done routinely in the past.

There were competing claims of responsibility for the suicide bombing, with Hamas announcing on its website that it was behind the attack. Hours after the blast, however, the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed group with ties to Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement, said it sent the bomber.

The target of the Bethlehem raid was the Aida refugee camp on the outskirts of town. Several dozen jeeps and armoured vehicles moved slowly through darkened streets in convoys, training spotlights onto houses.

Soldiers ringed the house of the bomber, Ali Jaara, a 24-year-old Palestinian policeman who had blown himself up on a bus in Jerusalem, killing ten people and injuring 50.

Figures could be seen moving past brightly lit windows in the building’s second floor and walking down an outdoor staircase. A few hours later, troops blew up the house with explosive charges.

It was the first military operation in the town since troops pulled out in July as part of a larger withdrawal called for under a US-backed peace plan.

Palestinian Cabinet minister Saeb Erekat condemned the raid. “Instead of sending soldiers and tanks to Bethlehem, Israel’s government should have sent negotiators to resume a meaningful peace process,” he said.

Elsewhere today, troops shot and killed an Islamic Jihad member, Jihad Suwaiti, near the West Bank town of Hebron. The military said the man fired shots from a Kalashnikov assault rifle as soldiers went to arrest him, and troops returned fire, killing him.

In the Gaza Strip , a tank crew shot and killed two Palestinians. The military said it fired on a group carrying two explosive devices and rocket-propelled grenades near the Israeli settlement of Dugit shortly after midnight. Palestinian hospital officials said one of the men was wearing a military-style uniform and both bodies were badly disfigured by shrapnel.

Elsewhere in the West Bank, troops demolished six buildings – one of them a four-storey apartment complex – where Hamas militants captured by Israeli forces used to live.