News Brief

A professor who won the Israel Prize was wounded by a pipe bomb at his Jerusalem home.

Police said they believe far right-wing activists carried out the attack against Ze’ev Sternhell, a political science professor at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University known for his hostility toward Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

Sternhell, who returned to Israel Wednesday from an extended period overseas, has been receiving threatening phone calls recently, his wife said, and the bombing sent him to the hospital Thursday with minor leg wounds.

In a controversial article published in Israel’s daily Ha’aretz several years ago, Sternhell wrote, “Had the Palestinians the least bit of sense, they would have concentrated their struggle against the settlements and would not plant explosives on the western side of the Green Line,” inside Israel proper.

A special task force will investigate the attack against Sternhell. A security detail has been assigned to the head of Peace Now in Israel, Yaniv Oppenheimer, after pamphlets were found near Sternhell’s home offering a reward for the murder of anyone connected to Peace Now.

“Something intolerable occurred that cannot be silenced,” prime minister-designate Tzipi Livni said at the annual Rosh Hashanah toast at the Foreign Ministry. “The State of Israel is a lawful state, and moreover it is populated by a society with values. It is the responsibility of the government and the Israeli society to renounce such phenomena as soon as they rear their heads.” Settlers’ organizations reject the charge that right-wing activists targeted Sternhell.

The Homesh First movement said the pamphlets were a “left-wing provocation,” Ynet reported.