Despite the outrage felt throughout Israel after Wednesday’s devastating terrorist attack in Afula, the peace process continued this week on its now fast-moving course toward Palestinian self-rule in the Gaza Strip and West Bank town of Jericho.
Talks between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization continued in Cairo and Paris, and the Israel Defense Force continued trucking vast quantities of material out of the two zones earmarked for initial Palestinian self-government.
At the Cairo and Paris negotiations, and also at multilateral talks on the environment that opened in The Hague on Wednesday, PLO representatives made a point of expressing their sorrow over the Afula attack.
In a certain way, those statements underscored the virtually unstoppable nature of the peace process now. Restarted last week after a month in suspension, it has acquired new momentum as the two parties strive to meet the terms of the self-rule accord signed last September in Washington.
Just 40 days after the Hebron massacre – the end of the Muslim mourning period for the victims of that attack – the Islamic fundamentalist Hamas movement kept its word to avenge those killed at the Tomb of the Patriarchs.
A 19-year-old member of Hamas’ armed wing, the Izz a-Din al-Kassam brigade, blew up a bus with a car bomb that killed eight people, including four teenagers, and wounded more than 50 at noontime Wednesday in the northern Israeli town of Afula.
Among those killed and wounded were the driver of the bus and junior high school pupils who had just started their lunch break.
Witnesses said they saw people torn to bits by the explosion, children whose hair had been completely burned away and body parts strewn across the ground.
An anonymous caller, who said he represented Hamas, named the suicide bomber as Raed Zakarneh. He indicated that 385 pounds of explosives had been used in the attack.
The explosive-laden car was parked only some 10 feet from the bus stop where the Afula-Migdal Ha’emek bus was loading passengers.
The steering wheel of the car was later found some 30 yards from the site of the explosion.
Zakarneh, a resident of the West Bank village of Kabatiya, was released from an Israeli jail only three months ago. He was said by fellow villagers to have recently become intensely religious.
A Hamas spokesman in Jordan promised further attacks in retaliation for the Hebron massacre of Feb. 25, in which at least 29 Muslim worshipers were killed by settler Dr. Baruch Goldstein at the Tomb of the Patriarchs.
The police and army had been on high alert after Hamas threatened to retaliate for the Hebron killings. But, as a somber national Police Chief Rafi Peled told reporters Wednesday, there is no realistic way of preventing every single terror attempt.
The timing of the attack – coming on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day and on the day when Palestinian police were to have taken over a large police installation in Gaza – cast a dark cloud over the entire country.
The bomb was “meant to murder the chances of Jews and Arabs living at peace together in this country,” said Israel’s President Ezer Weizman. “But on this day, as we stand about to remember the dead of the Holocaust, the hell unleashed here shall not succeed in killing our will for peace.”
The U.S. State Department condemned the attack in the “strongest possible terms” and urged PLO leader Yasser Arafat to condemn it as well.
“We certainly hope that Chairman Arafat would condemn this act of violence,” State Department spokesman Mike McCurry said. “The language would be of the chairman’s choosing, but it would be helpful if he expressed himself on this incident.”
Egyptian Foreign Minister Amre Moussa expressed his sorrow at the attack in a telephone call to Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres.
Nabil Sha’ath, the head of the Palestinian delegation to the Cairo talks, said the bomb attack showed “how important it is to sign an Israel-Palestinian accord as soon as possible. We are pushing forward with the talks precisely to put an end to the killing on both sides.”
Leaders of Israeli opposition parties called for Israel to put an immediate end to the Cairo talks, as the PLO had done after the Hebron massacre.
“The negotiations with the PLO must be called off immediately,” said Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu, who linked the attack to the Rabin government’s “policy of surrender” in dealing with the PLO.
The sentiment was echoed by former army chief of staff Rafael Eitan, leader of the right-wing Tsomet party, who said the ongoing pullout from Gaza had encouraged the terrorist action.
“Deport the leaders of Hamas and the PLO,” Eitan urged. “Suspend the talks.”
In Jerusalem and other cities, right-wing youths held rowdy demonstrations Wednesday night against the governments’s policy of negotiating with the PLO.
Angry protest demonstrations were also quickly mounted in a number of towns in northern Israel.
Police were quick to take preventive action in Afula, which lies close to the northern border of the West Bank and which is also surrounded by Israeli Arab villages.
On at least one occasion in the past few years, when Afula was the site of another terror attack, angry mobs almost lynched Arab workers in the town.
At the United Nations, Israeli Permanent Representative Gad Yaacobi called on the Security Council to censure the bombing. On March 18, the Security Council passed Resolution 904, condemning the Hebron massacre and calling for international observers to guarantee the safety of Palestinians in Hebron.
The international community and the nations of the Middle East, Yaacobi wrote in a letter to Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, must not surrender to crazed fanatics who seek to destroy the chances for peace.
He did not ask to convene the Security Council, saying that advancing peace and security is a matter for the direct parties in the negotiations.
McCurry also spoke of seeking a Security Council resolution condemning the Afula attack.
“We believe it would be appropriate when there are acts of terrorism of this nature for those acts to be condemned by the international community,” McCurry said.
“We certainly will consult with our colleagues in the world community and specifically with other members of the United Nations on what is the best way to condemn this particular act,” he said.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
