Thursday, October 27, 2005

Suicide bomber kills five in Israel.

From ABC News Online: Thursday, October 27, 2005. 5:07am (AEST). (Note how Abbas's "condemnation", as usual, refers to how it "harms the interestst of the Palestinian people..." but expresses no sympathy for the Israeli people.) ...

A Palestinian suicide bomber has killed five people in a crowded market in an Israeli coastal city (Hadera). Islamic Jihad has claimed responsibility for the bombing, saying it was avenging Israel's killing of a top West Bank commander on Monday.

'It was chaos, bodies and blood on the ground, people running everywhere,' said Eduard Khanukai, 49, owner of a money exchange shop. ...The bomber blew up in front of a sandwich stand in the main outdoor market in Hadera, a frequent target of attacks in a five-year-old Palestinian uprising.

Medics say five people have been killed and 30 have been wounded in the blast, which blew out shop windows and shattered nearby parked cars. It is the first bombing inside the Jewish state since August 28, when a suicide attacker wounded 20 people in Beersheba. Israeli officials have noted that the Hadera attack follows remarks in Tehran by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - carried by the official IRNA news agency on Wednesday - that Israel should be 'wiped off the map'. 'What makes these people dangerous is that their violent language is transformed into violent action,' Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has condemned the bombing and has pledged to try to salvage the truce he had engineered. "It harms the interest of the Palestinian people and leads to expansion of the cycle of violence," he said in a statement.

Reaction
The bloodshed threatens to unravel an already shaky ceasefire and has cast a shadow over international hopes of a revival of peacemaking since the Gaza pullout.

"The Palestinians need to prepare some real action to stop terrorism if they want to move the process forward," a top Israeli official said. "They condemn every attack and we bury our dead."
White House spokesman Scott McClellan has called the bombing "a heinous attack on innocent civilians. The Palestinian Authority needs to do more to end the violence and prevent terrorist attacks from being carried out..." ....

Reuters

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