A young woman suicide bomber killed six other people and wounded scores more near a crowded Jerusalem market today just hours after US Secretary of State Colin Powell started a peace mission in the city.
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Scene after an explosion in the centre of Jerusalem today. Photograph: Reuters
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The bomb went off as the woman was approaching a bus at a station on west Jerusalem's main commercial artery, Jaffa Road, where Israelis were getting in some late afternoon shopping before the Jewish Sabbath, police said.
"There was a blast and then just utter panic. Women screaming, running away as fast as they could," said Mr Aaron Kreisler, a burly physics teacher from Uzbekistan, waving his fists angrily in the air.
"There must have been at least 100 people near that bus station and the shop," Mr Kreisler said. "It just seemed to hurt so many people. There was no way they could have been helped."
Police said seven people, including the bomber, died and 84 were wounded, eight of them seriously. It was the second suicide bombing in three days after eight Israeli soldiers and policemen were killed on a bus in northern Israel.
The dead and wounded today, many badly burnt, littered Jaffa Road, a frequent target for suicide bombers. The blast blew the windows out of a row of shops and hurled crates of fruits and vegetables hundreds of metres away.
The blast was claimed by the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed offshoot of Palestinian leader Mr Yasser Arafat's Fatah group, in a call to a television station run by the radical Islamic Shiite group Hezbollah in Beirut.
Israeli security sources said the woman bomber was from the city of Hebron, one of the two major towns to have been spared by Israel's two-week military offensive on the West Bank.
The explosion went off after Mr Powell had completed a first round of talks with Israeli leaders and headed for a tour of the country's troubled northern border with Lebanon.
Israeli officials reacted bitterly to the attack and demanded Mr Powell do more to put a stop to the suicide bombings.
Government spokesman Mr Daniel Seaman said the attack was ample justification for Israel to continue its two-week-old offensive against Palestinian militants on the West Bank, despite US pressure to halt.
"What alternative do we have?" he asked. "The world can see that we have none."
But Mr Mohammad Dahlan, the Palestinian head of preventive security chief on the Gaza Strip, said Mr Sharon was responsible for the blast because of his continued West Bank military offensive.
"It is the result of the resentment Ariel Sharon caused with the massacres and crimes perpetrated against the Palestinian people in Jenin, Nablus and elsewhere," Mr Dahlan said, referring to Palestinian accusations of mass killings by Israeli troops there.
It was the third suicide bombing attributed to a woman. Two weeks ago a teenage Palestinian girl blew herself up in a supermarket in west Jerusalem, killing two people.
AFP