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Jerusalem Attack Drives Israelis Into Frenzy
JERUSALEM, Aug 9 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - As terrified survivors shook uncontrollably and Jewish boys screamed calls for revenge, randomly attacking Palestinian workers, Jerusalem's Israeli mayor, Ehud Olmert, crunched shattered glass underfoot and surveyed the scene of Thursday's deadly bomb attack in the heart of this occupied city.
"I am feeling the pain and concern and fear of many people," Olmert said just 30 meters from the rubble that only an hour earlier had been the popular Sbarro pizzeria.
Rival hardline Palestinian resistance groups, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, have both claimed responsibility for the bombing.
Speaking before Israelis, and especially settlers, rampaged against Palestinian civilians working in Jerusalem, Olmert said, "I call on the people of Jerusalem to remain calm and cool, this is the evidence of our strength."
But cosmetic consultant Nitzana Mor, who was 20 meters from the restaurant when the bomber launched his attack that killed 18 people and injured more than 80, was unable to hold back. Reports say that five or six of the victims were infants.
"I heard the explosion and I just froze, so did many people," Mor told AFP. "Some people ran, but many froze. We were all so scared."
Mor, a former policewoman, said she tried not to look at the wreckage of the pizza shop as emergency workers pulled the dead and injured from the rubble while others, drenched in blood, stumbled away.
"I was in the police for 15 years, I worked in intelligence and I saw many pictures of dead people, but today I am terrified."
Other people who narrowly escaped death cowered in bus shelters and in nearby laneways shaking and crying as friends and strangers comforted them.
Others massed around the cordoned off bomb site at the normally busy junction of Jaffa Road and King George V Street also voiced their outrage.
"We have to fight back," Novick Lee, 36, from Jericho, who was sitting inside a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant about 50 meters from Sbarro when the bomb exploded.
Lee, who was born in the United States, but "returned" to Israel and fought in Lebanon for the Israeli army, said it was virtually impossible to stop attacks.
"We went up to Lebanon to fight the terrorists and then we left. Now look at these terrorists who return. They don't understand peace," he said.
"So if there's no way to make peace, I have to fight and I have to die for my ground. You have to fight to survive."
His words were echoed by a group of about a dozen boys aged no older than 15 who gathered around the police cordon wearing t-shirts that read: "With no Arabs, there will be no bombs, there will be peace."
"We want revenge. Kill the Arabs," the children chanted.
Sensing that the mood was growing among the crowd to lynch Palestinians, Olmert called on Israelis to not launch revenge attacks on Arabs.
"We have to be calm and we have to remember we are not fighting the Palestinian people," he told reporters.
"Palestinian people who live here are partners of ours. They have not been violent in all these 10 months [of the Intifada, or uprising] and we will not take any measures of revenge against innocent people in Jerusalem or anywhere else," he said, referring to the large Palestinian population in Jerusalem.
"We will reach out for the killers and we will kill them."
But amid a second bomb scare at the nearby Central Bus Station, which turned out to be only a bus tire exploding, a group of Jewish people set upon three Israeli Arabs at the crowded Mahanei Yehudah market on Jaffa Road.
But Israeli security forces protected the three Arabs and got them safely out of the market before they were injured.
News agency photos from Jerusalem Thursday also showed Israeli soldiers rushing in to protect a lone, Palestinian woman from young Jewish settlers harassing her, and a Palestinian man being attacked by Israeli Jerusalem residents after the bombing.
For its part, a senior Israeli government official said Thursday that the government would mete out an "adequate response" to the day's bombing.
"There will be a proper and adequate response, proportionate to the event," said the official, who asked not to be named.
The official refused to say what a proportionate response might be to the attack.
"You saw how horrendous [the bombing] was," he told AFP.
The official said the individual who ordered Thursday's bombing in west Jerusalem was one of seven names on a list of Israel's "most wanted" Palestinians, which was released last weekend.
The official refused to say whether Israel would extend its assassination policy to the men on the list, although analysts said it was a reasonable assumption.
A meeting of the so-called "kitchen cabinet" of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Defense Minister Binjamin Ben Eliezer and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres met to discuss the situation late Thursday, and a meeting of the larger security cabinet was scheduled to sit down around 11:30 pm, sources close to the government said.
Earlier reports had said that Peres, who takes a more conciliatory approach to the conflict that his chief, had not been invited to the initial meeting.
The senior official described a Yasser Arafat condemnation of the attack as a "PR poly," and said the Palestinian leader had only issued the statement after leading European nations had roundly denounced the bombing.
But while saying Arafat was partly responsible for inciting such bombings and not doing enough to rein in resistance forces, the official said Israel was "not going to go after the Palestinian Authority."
"We have no intention of bring about the collapse of the Palestinian Authority," he said.
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