Slain Teacher, 3 Children Buried in Israel; 3 Arabs Held

As hundreds of mourners buried a schoolteacher and her three small children slain during a firebomb ambush of a public bus, Israel’s leaders vowed Monday to punish Arabs suspected of the attack, and two took the extraordinary step of recommending that the death penalty be applied.

Israeli troops arrested three suspects who confessed to throwing the gasoline bombs at the bus Sunday night after deciding on the action during an evening card game, Israeli authorities said. Following routine procedure in such cases, soldiers demolished the suspects’ homes in the West Bank town of Jericho, the site of the attack.

Troops on bulldozers also uprooted banana and orange trees that had shielded the attackers from view along the highway where the bus was bombed.

The killings and funeral lent a somber air to election eve. Today’s national voting pits two main parties along with numerous fringe groups in a quest for a working majority in Israel’s 120-member Knesset, or Parliament.

The fatal firebombing is expected to echo in the voting booth. Some political experts think that wavering voters may now lean to the rightist Likud Bloc of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, which favors harsh measures to put down the 10-month-old Arab uprising in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Likud’s main rival, the center-left Labor Alignment led by Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, has campaigned on a pledge to hold talks with Palestinians and eventually withdraw from some occupied land in return for peace.

Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin, a prominent Labor member, took a tough stand on punishment for the West Bank killings. On a tour of Jericho, he announced that the death penalty should be applied in the case. No one has been executed in Israel since 1962, when Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann was hanged for atrocities against Jews.

Rabin said he would recommend that the army command on the West Bank examine means of using Israeli laws that allow for the death penalty in terrorism cases.

He assailed the “murderers of women and children who have lost all shades of humanity.”

Rabin’s call for the death penalty was seconded by Justice Minister Avraham Sharir, a member of Likud. Although rightists in Israel have on occasion called for the death penalty, it has not been invoked, at least in part because of fear of retaliation against Israeli prisoners held by Arab governments or anti-Israeli groups.

On Israel Radio, Prime Minister Shamir expressed doubt that the attack was intended to have any effect on the election, adding that it “had no logic.”

“I hope the murderers and those who sent them and their supporters will feel the serious consequences to them and their surroundings of their heinous hatred towards us,” he added.

Industry Minister Ariel Sharon, a hawkish Likud candidate for the Knesset, openly seized the direct political opportunity offered by the attack. He accused political rivals of being soft on Arabs and thus encouraging such incidents. “All talk of withdrawal or pullbacks brings more and more firebomb attacks,” he told a newspaper.

The victims of the Sunday attack were Rachel Weiss, a teacher in a religious school in Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee, and her three sons, Nathanel, 3; Rafael, 2, and Efraim, 10 months.

The other 19 passengers on the bus fled the flames, but Weiss stayed aboard to protect her children against what she thought was a continuing terrorist assault from outside, witnesses said.

Weiss, her husband and children were traveling from Tiberias to visit relatives in Jerusalem. Her husband escaped unharmed.