Steve Quayle News Alerts

May 28, 2002

JERUSALEM (CNN) -- Palestinian gunmen attacked two Jewish settlements in the West Bank on Tuesday, killing four Israelis and wounding two others, officials said Tuesday.

Three of those deaths came in an attack late Tuesday in Itamar, near Nablus, when a Palestinian gunman entered the settlement and opened fire. In addition, two 14-year-old Israelis were wounded before security forces killed the gunman, officials said.

Earlier, Palestinian gunfire killed one Israeli and wounded another Tuesday near the West Bank settlement of Ofra, north of Ramallah, settler sources and the Israel Defense Forces said Tuesday. The sources did not say if the casualties were civilian or military, and there was no immediate word from Palestinian officials about the report.

The shootings followed new Israeli moves into Palestinian-ruled West Bank cities after a suicide bombing Monday that killed two Israelis near Tel Aviv. The IDF said it had arrested 11 Palestinians -- including a man they said was a local Hamas leader -- during overnight raids Monday in the West Bank town of Jenin.

Israeli troops had withdrawn from Jenin by Tuesday afternoon, the IDF said.

Eight of those arrested in Jenin, including Rami Awad, the local leader of the military wing of the militant Islamic group Hamas, were on Israel's wanted list, the IDF said. Palestinians and Israeli soldiers exchanged gunfire near Awad's Jenin home.

Hamas, a Palestinian Islamic fundamentalist organization, has been labeled by the U.S. State Department as a terrorist organization. The group's military wing, Izzedine al Qassam, has admitted responsibility for earlier attacks on Israeli civilians and military targets.

According to the Palestine Red Crescent Society, one Palestinian -- a 55-year-old man -- was shot dead and two others were injured by live ammunition in Jenin. The IDF had no immediate comment on casualties.

The IDF and Israeli border police arrested another eight Palestinian terror suspects in other raids across the West Bank.

According to the IDF, two Palestinians were arrested in Hebron, two in Beit Jala, two in the village of Azoun near Qalqilya and two in the village of Beit Anan north of Jerusalem. All of those arrested were transferred to Israeli security forces for questioning, the IDF said.

The Jenin refugee camp was the scene of intense fighting last month that sparked a dispute between the Palestinians and Israelis over the extent of civilian casualties.

Israel said about 50 Palestinians -- not hundreds as the Palestinians initially alleged -- were killed in the fighting, which it said was part of a larger campaign to root out the West Bank's "terrorist infrastructure." The Palestine Red Crescent Society said the bodies of 53 Palestinians were recovered; about half of those were believed to be noncombatants.

Baby, grandmother die in attack

In Monday's terror attack in the Tel Aviv suburb of Petah Tikva, a Palestinian suicide bomber struck a cafe outside a mall, killing a 1-year-old girl and her grandmother and wounding dozens more, 10 of them seriously.

A Hezbollah television station in Lebanon reported that the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades claimed responsibility for the attack. A senior member of Al Aqsa was arrested earlier Monday in a refugee camp near Bethlehem.

Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades is a military offshoot of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement and has carried out numerous attacks against military targets and civilians in Israel and in Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. In March, the U.S. State Department designated the group as a foreign terrorist organization.

Police said Monday's Palestinian bomber walked up to a table and set off the detonation. Overturned chairs and tables littered the scene, and a damaged baby stroller was visible.

"I saw a baby that had half a regular face and half a face that was just blood and flesh," Shai Gat, a 19-year-old soldier who arrived at the scene a few minutes after the attack, told The Associated Press. (Full story)

The cafe did not have a security guard, he said, describing the situation as normal for a small establishment. The nearby mall did have a guard, and Kleinman said it was possible the bomber turned to the cafe after seeing the mall guard.

Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat said Arafat condemned Monday's terror attack.

"And, once again, we reiterate, we don't condone the killings of Israeli civilians -- or Palestinian civilians for that matter," Erakat said.

He said the Palestinian Authority "cannot accept" blame for the latest bombing, saying Israeli incursions into the West Bank have undermined Palestinian rule. "We don't have any areas under our control," Erakat said.

He said an Israeli military response would worsen matters. "Military solutions will only produce more violence, more extremism and more despair," he said.

Erakat noted that four Palestinians were killed during Israeli incursions over the weekend, including a 12-year-old girl.

The IDF expressed sorrow "for the tragic incident" in which, Palestinians said, the girl and a female relative were killed by an Israeli tank shell in a refugee camp in central Gaza.

http://www.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/meast/05/28/mideast/index.html