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Car Bomb Blasts Israel
JERUSALEM, May 25 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - A car bomb exploded near the central bus station in the northern Israeli town of Hadera on Friday, killing two presumed bombers and wounding at least 12 other people, police said.
"A terrible disaster could have occurred but apparently it was a miracle more people were not injured," a spokesman for the bus company told Israeli public radio.
Israeli public radio said a bomb-laden taxi blew up Friday afternoon next to a public bus in Hadera, 70 kilometers (43 miles) northwest of Jerusalem, and that either one or two of the injured were babies. All the injured were believed to be passengers.
Their presumed bombers vehicle was blown to bits, charred beyond recognition and strewn across a road near the bus station.
It was the second bomb attack in the town in six months and came exactly one week after a bomber hit a shopping center in the coastal resort of Netanya, south of Hadera, killing himself and five Israelis, and was claimed by the Palestinian Islamic resistance movement Hamas.
The leader of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, warned earlier Friday that its bombers would continue their operations against the Israelis, following the failure of an attack against the army in the Gaza Strip.
"If the Israeli army thinks its positions are impregnable it is mistaken, because we have candidates for martyrdom who will know how to hit the Israelis wherever they are," he told journalists, news agencies reported.
Hamas's armed wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, said in a statement that one of its activists, Hussein Abu Nasr, was killed when the bomb-laden truck he was driving exploded near an Israeli military position in the Gaza Strip.
"The martyr Abu Nasr wanted to tell the Israelis that every aggression demands a reply," Yassin added.
Hamas has said it had 10 volunteers for attacks, and described the blast on May 18th, which killed five Israelis and the bomber in the coastal resort of Netanya as the seventh.
Earlier, a truck bomb sparked off new fighting in the Gaza Strip between Palestinians and Israelis.
The Palestinians said Israeli tanks had penetrated two areas of autonomous Palestinian territory, including one near Netzarim, wounding five policemen.
The latest deaths bring to 568 the number of people killed since the Palestinian Intifada, or uprising, against Israeli occupation broke out last September.
Elsewhere in Gaza, Israel opened fire with heavy machine guns on the Yebna refugee camp near Rafah on the border with Egypt, security sources said, without reporting any injuries.
The camp has been the scene of fierce gunfights over the past two days.
In spite of another week of bloody violence in Israel and the occupied territories, Palestinian number two Mahmud Abbas said Israel and the Palestinians can still re-establish confidence.
Abbas said that all contact has not been broken with Israel. The two sides can still "reestablish confidence between them. It is possible. The interests and the destiny of the two peoples demand it."
In Washington on Thursday, the State Department had said that recently named U.S. special envoy to the Middle East, William Burns, and two other U.S. officials, are expected to meet with Arafat "soon."
U.S. Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk and U.S. Consul General Ronald Schlicher are slated to participate in the meeting with Burns and Arafat, for which a date has not yet been set.
Indyk and Schlicher already met with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon following publication of the international Mitchell commission report, which offers recommendations aimed at ending the violence and bringing Israelis and Palestinians back to the negotiating table.
Reeker said there is a strong "need for both sides to do everything they can to stop the violence."
At the same time, Arafat wrapped up a tour that took him to France, Egypt and Jordan, to discuss the Mitchell report. After he met with Jordan's King Abdullah in Amman both men called for a clear application mechanism for the report and for a "direct American role" in that.
In Ramallah later Thursday, the Palestinian leadership rejected any selective application of the Mitchell report by Israel.
And in an interview with the London-based Arabic daily Al-Hayat published Friday, Arafat said it would be difficult for Sharon to avoid the report's recommendations because there are "currently American, European and Russian initiatives" in favor of it.
Sharon has accepted the report but is refusing to order a freeze on Jewish settlements.
Meanwhile, Israeli rescuers continued the grim search Friday for dozens of people feared dead in the rubble of a Jerusalem wedding hall that collapsed overnight, killing at least 30 in the nation's worst-ever civil disaster.
The Israeli Red Cross, the Magen David Adom, said a total of 309 injured survivors had been taken to hospital, 16 of whom were in serious condition.
Many of the some 650 guests at a wedding party were sent plunging several stories to the ground when the building collapsed because of what Israeli authorities said were structural faults.
"One thing we have verified ... is that it was not an explosion, it was not an act of terror that caused this collapse," Jerusalem mayor Ehud Olmert said.
Sharon expressed "deep sorrow," vowing to investigate the cause "until the bottom."
And the Palestinian leadership offered its condolences for the "tragic accident" and said instructions had been issued to offer assistance in rescue operations.
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