U.S. Calls Bus Attack an Act of Terrorism

Almost a week after a Palestinian killed 14 Israelis by causing a public bus to crash in Israel, the State Department agreed today that the episode was an act of terrorism.

U.S. failure to define the attack as a terrorist act had become a quickly growing irritant between Washington and Jerusalem, with the Israeli Foreign Ministry earlier today calling the State Department’s silence on the issue “a license for the Palestinians to kill.”

Foreign Minister Moshe Arens called U.S. Ambassador William Brown to his office Monday to express his government’s “displeasure” at the silence and also said the Palestine Liberation Organization’s failure to denounce the act violated the terms under which a U.S.-PLO dialogue was set up in December.

At the State Department today, spokesman Richard Boucher, who earlier had refused to label the bus attack terrorism, said, “On the basis of available evidence now, it was clearly a terrorist attack.”

Boucher said the shift in official words was based partly on the claim of responsibility by the Islamic Jihad of Palestine and partly on the motives attributed to Abd Hadi Sulayman Ghunaym, who carried out the attack.

Israeli reports said Ghunaym, a resident of the occupied Gaza Strip, planned the attack and steered the bus into a steep ravine because he was outraged that a Palestinian friend, injured by Israeli military authorities, had been refused permission to leave the country for medical treatment.

Boucher said, “We don’t know who, if anyone, was responsible other than this particular individual.” But he said the PLO had condemned the Wednesday attack that killed 14 Israelis and injured 27 others, including seven Americans.