HAIFA, 6 March 2003 — At least 15 people were killed and more than 30 wounded yesterday as a bomber blew himself up on a bus in the northern Israeli town of Haifa, the first bombing in the Jewish state in exactly two months. The bus was ripped to pieces while traveling between a residential area on the city’s Carmel heights and Haifa university, public television said. Ten of the wounded were said to be in serious condition.
The bomber was wearing a belt packed with several dozen kilos of explosives and nails to cause maximum damage.
Hard-line Palestinian groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad said the blast, which created chaos and carnage in the city, was revenge for a string of bloody raids by the Israeli Army into the Gaza Strip in recent weeks.
But the Palestinian leadership condemned the attack, saying it would divert international sympathy away from the far higher Palestinian civilian death toll.
“We condemn all attacks against civilians including today’s attack in Haifa,” said Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo.
The Palestinian Authority said the attack would serve as “a pretext for Israel’s government and occupation army to step up its deadly campaign which caused the deaths of 77 Palestinians in February”.
It was the first bomb attack inside Israel since Jan. 5, and came just days after hawkish Prime Minister Ariel Sharon appointed the most right-wing government in Israel’s history on a pledge to get tough on security.
In the January attack, which was claimed by an armed offshoot of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction, two Palestinian bombers blew themselves up in central Tel Aviv, killing 23 other people.
Yesterday’s blast occurred less than 25 meters from the house of the dovish Labour Party leader Amram Mitzna, who led his center-left party to a historic defeat in last month’s elections on a pledge to leave Gaza and renew talks with the Palestinians.
“The explosion occurred inside the bus, and was very powerful. There’s almost nothing left of the bus,” fire brigade officer Gershon Zoberman said. “The scenes are horrific here, twisted metal, it is very difficult to look at,” one eye-witness told public radio. “The center of the bus lifted up into the air, the roof was torn off. It looked like a blast inside the bus, and within seconds people began taking the wounded out,” another witness told private television.
US President George W. Bush condemned the “attack on innocents in Israel,” White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said, adding that “his message to the terrorists is: Their efforts will not be successful”.
“He will continue to pursue the path to peace in the Middle East, and he urges all to condemn today’s attack.”
EU foreign policy supremo also lammed the attack, although also took a jab at Israel, saying, “There have been too many civilians killed in the last weeks and the last days.”
The attack came two days after Israeli forces staged a bloody raid into a refugee camp in Gaza. Abdel Aziz Al-Rantissi, a senior Hamas leader, said the attack “is a response to the Jewish terror that killed an 85-year-old man and the day before a pregnant woman.”
