Six hurt in Jerusalem rampage

About 10 hours before Sen. Barack Obama checked into the King David, Avi Levi was driving by the hotel and felt a construction vehicle strike the rear of his No. 13 bus.

He stopped, thinking it was just an accident on the heavily guarded route past West Jerusalem’s classiest hotels and shops, an area dotted with construction sites.

But within seconds, the yellow backhoe loader’s massive shovel was smashing the side of his bus like a battering ram, nearly tipping it over and showering 30 screaming passengers with glass.

It was the start of a rampage Tuesday that ended with six Israelis injured and the Palestinian assailant dead, shot by a pistol-toting Jewish settler and a border policeman in front of scores of terrified onlookers.

The dead man, wearing shorts and the white skullcap typical of an observant Muslim, was identified as a 22-year-old Jerusalem resident employed for years driving construction vehicles. Israeli authorities called it a terrorist attack but said he may have acted alone, inspired by a similar rampage three weeks ago.

Obama, speaking from Jordan before his arrival here amid heightened police vigilance, deplored the attack as “a reminder of what Israelis have courageously lived with on a daily basis for far too long.” He added, “I will always support Israel in confronting terrorism and pursuing everlasting peace and security.”

In fact, it’s been years since the second Palestinian uprising petered out and most Israelis stopped fearing suicide bombings on buses and in crowded cafes. The army has sealed off the West Bank and Gaza Strip more effectively. But Tuesday’s rampage appears to be part of a new threat. Like two deadly attacks on the Jewish side of the city this year, it was carried out by a Palestinian whose residence in mostly Arab East Jerusalem gave him license to travel throughout Israel.

And as in the previous attack, in which three Israelis were killed July 2, the weapon was a heavy construction vehicle to which the perpetrator apparently had access through his job.

“They keep on inventing ways to attack us,” Mayor Uri Lupolianski told reporters, after hearing the nearby commotion and rushing to the scene. “Every work tool has become a weapon.”

The string of attacks has raised tensions between Jews and Arabs in Jerusalem, the city at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Lupolianski joined Public Security Minister Avi Dichter in demanding that the latest assailant’s home be demolished as a deterrent. The mayor also called for “rethinking” the kinds of jobs Jerusalem Palestinians are allowed to hold.

Israel annexed East Jerusalem after capturing it, along with the West Bank, in the 1967 Middle East War. The 208,000 Palestinians who live there make up about one-third of the city’s population but lack citizenship. Many identify with the Palestinian struggle to achieve statehood and regain control of East Jerusalem.

Police said Tuesday’s attacker, identified as Ghassan abu Teir, apparently drove the loader from a construction site in Jerusalem’s upscale Yemin Moshe district, blocks from the scene of destruction.

Seeking to prevent anti-Israeli demonstrations, police went to Um Tuba, his home village on the city’s southern edge, and forbade his relatives to set up a traditional mourning tent.

Family members interrogated by the police said Ghassan had not been involved in politics or militant Islam, even though a relative from the same village, Mohammed abu Teir, was elected to the Palestinian Authority parliament in 2006 as a member of the militant Islamic group Hamas.

The lawmaker, now imprisoned, is well known in Israel, where he was lampooned on television because of an orange-dyed beard worn as a symbol of his fundamentalist Islamic beliefs. He was arrested two summers ago in a broad Israeli crackdown on Hamas after the group’s capture of an Israeli soldier, who is still being held.

Hamas’ spokesman in Gaza praised Tuesday’s attack. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, Hamas’ U.S.-backed rival who is leading peace talks with Israel, condemned it. The attack occurred shortly before 2 p.m. as Abbas was meeting a few blocks away with Israeli President Shimon Peres.

With passengers screaming, “Open the doors!” and the shovel swinging toward his head, Levi turned his bus abruptly onto a side street and escaped further damage. The loader kept moving along King David Street for about 500 yards, zigzagging to attack pedestrians and smash a pickup truck and three sedans.

“The first thing he tried was to lower the shovel on a female pedestrian right near me,” said Moshe Feiglin, a passerby. “There was a boom when the shovel hit the street. He missed by centimeters.”

One car was flipped on its roof and its driver suffered a severe leg injury. Rescue workers said five other people sustained less serious injuries and 23 were treated for shock.

Bentzi Gottesman, a shopkeeper, said he pulled pieces of glass from a 6-month-old boy’s head, leg and hand wounds after carrying him from the bus and calming his hysterical mother.

As the loader targeted cars stopped at a traffic light during the sweltering midafternoon heat, Yaki Asael, a 53-year-old West Bank settler and former army platoon commander, emerged coolly from the panicked crowd and fired his pistol upward into the cabin.

“After a few shots, I saw the driver shake and fall, and then he didn’t move,” said Moshe Shimshi, a passerby.

But when border policeman Amal Ganem arrived at the scene and also fired into the cabin, a man nearby shouted, “He’s not dead! He’s not dead!” Ganem moved to another side of the loader for a better angle and fired again.

The driver was found sprawled backward in the cabin, which had been punctured by 20 bullets before the loader came to rest on a sidewalk outside the King Solomon Hotel.

--

boudreaux@latimes.com