Argentines March Against Terror : Bombing: The death toll from the Israeli Embassy attack is now 25, including the No. 2 envoy.

President Carlos Saul Menem and other Argentine leaders joined a multitude of marchers Thursday in a show of unity against terrorists who bombed the Israeli Embassy here, killing at least 25 people.

“These beasts must understand that for every soldier of peace who falls, as they fell here in Argentina on March 17, thousands more soldiers will rise to continue the struggle for peace,” Menem told the throng. Less than a block away, a power shovel cleared rubble from the site of the demolished embassy as civil defense workers continued searching for bodies.

The dead included the embassy’s No. 2 diplomat.

A statement issued Wednesday in Beirut said the bombing was carried out in the name of Islamic Jihad, a fundamentalist Shiite Muslim group notorious for previous terrorist acts, by an Argentine convert to Islam. Argentine authorities have reported no information on the alleged suicide bomber, called Abu Yasser in the Islamic Jihad statement.

But Jose Luis Manzano, the interior minister, confirmed Thursday evening that the explosion came from a powerful car bomb in front of the downtown embassy building. Investigators have collected widely scattered parts from the shattered vehicle, Manzano said.

He said the death toll was known to be 24 as of 6 p.m. Thursday. A little later, searchers uncovered a 25th body, the fourth to be found Thursday.

Jorge Cohen, the Israeli Embassy’s Argentine press spokesman, told reporters that four Israelis and four Argentine employees of the embassy were known or presumed to have been killed. Kalman Sultanik, a visiting vice president of the World Jewish Congress, had reported Wednesday that 11 Israelis were killed, but Cohen said that Sultanik was wrong.

Among the four Israelis killed was American-born David Ben-Rafael, the embassy’s counselor or second-ranking official. Ambassador Itzhak Shefi was out of the embassy at the time.

Also killed were Eli Carmon, wife of Consul Danny Carmon, and Zehava Zcehavi, wife of Yitzhak Zcehavi, the embassy’s first secretary. Carmon was the mother of five young children, and Zcehavi was the mother of three.

An Argentine air force Boeing 707 flew the women’s bodies, the widowers and the children home to Israel on Thursday. An Argentine reporter aboard the plane quoted Carmon as saying that his wife smothered to death under the rubble of the embassy.

“They told me that my wife cried for help for 11 hours and that she was found almost without marks,” he said. The consul was injured on the head, neck and legs.

Another Israeli employee of the embassy, Eli Ben-Zeev, was missing and presumed dead, press spokesman Cohen said. Other victims included passersby, police guards, workers who were remodeling the embassy, embassy visitors, residents of a retirement home across the street and a priest from the Roman Catholic church next to the retirement home.

Several embassy employees were seriously injured, Cohen said. Argentine officials have said that the explosion injured a total of more than 200 people.

Cohen, working in a part of the embassy left mostly intact, was slightly injured himself. He said most of the mission’s 70 Israeli and Argentine employees were out of the embassy at the time of the explosion early Tuesday afternoon.

“I heard two explosions,” Cohen said. But he added that the second noise may have been the sound of the building collapsing rather than a bomb.

Interior Minister Manzano said the car bomb was in a Ford pickup truck. He earlier had called it a Ford Fairlane.

He said investigators believe the terrorists belonged to a foreign group, which he did not identify, and had local support. The DyN news agency said federal police investigators searched a building near the bombed embassy Thursday afternoon for “men with Arab features.”

Manzano said that the CIA, Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency and Spanish intelligence officers are participating in the investigation at Argentina’s request.

At Thursday’s mass demonstration, Menem called terrorists “traffickers of hate and death” and said his government has “firmly decided to raise a barrier against these acts of barbarity.”

“Starting with this fact, relations between Israel and Argentina will be more fluid, closer. They will be galvanized,” he said.

Among others at the march were members of Menem’s Cabinet and members of Congress, Roman Catholic Archbishop Antonio Quarracino of Buenos Aires and former President Raul Alfonsin.

Manzano estimated the size of the crowd at 60,000, and other estimates ranged to more than 100,000. Many marchers waved Argentine and Israeli flags.