Palestinian Kills Israeli, Wounds 4; Travel Curbed

A Palestinian extremist, armed with a submachine gun, fired on Israeli civilians and soldiers in a drive-by attack in the Israeli port city of Ashdod on Thursday, killing one person and wounding four.

The incident occurred even as the armed wing of a Palestinian fundamentalist group announced a campaign of terror, which it said would turn Israel and the occupied territories into a war zone in the next seven days.

The warning from the extremist group Hamas was contained in leaflets distributed in the territories. They said there would be four more attacks, including a rocket barrage, on Israeli targets in continuing retaliation for the Feb. 25 massacre of about 30 Palestinians in a Hebron mosque.

Later Thursday, another radical Islamic fundamentalist group took responsibility for the drive-by shooting, the second deadly Palestinian attack on Israeli civilians in two days. Islamic Jihad, which occasionally coordinates attacks with Hamas, said one of its members--a Palestinian refugee from Gaza who was shot and killed by two Israeli bystanders during the Ashdod attack--had acted in retaliation for the Hebron massacre.

The escalating violence came as Israel observed a morning moment of silence and reflection for its annual commemoration of the Holocaust.

In other developments Thursday:

* Within hours of the drive-by shooting, police issued a blanket order barring all Palestinians from traveling into Israel from the occupied territories, canceling thousands of special permits issued to Palestinian laborers in the weeks since the territories were sealed after the Hebron massacre. The new “comprehensive closure” took effect at 5 p.m. Thursday, and a police spokesman said it will continue “until further notice.”

* Israeli families in the northern town of Afula angrily and tearfully buried teen-age girls, teachers and a bus driver who were among the eight killed and more than 45 wounded when a Hamas suicide-bomber blew up an Israeli passenger bus Wednesday--an attack that Hamas said Thursday was just the opening salvo in a strategy to turn Israel’s Independence Day next Thursday “into hell.”

The Palestine Liberation Organization officially expressed regret and sent condolences to families of the victims of the Afula bus bombing. The PLO statement was criticized by some as insufficient.

* Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s government resisted angry calls from the Israeli opposition to halt talks with the PLO on Palestinian autonomy.

* The government, citing security concerns, canceled a Palestinian conference at a Jerusalem hotel at which the Rev. Jesse Jackson was to speak.

Security and Mourning

As family and friends in Afula left flowers at a charred bus stand Thursday and mourned with anger at funerals throughout the sleepy blue-collar town, some residents echoed Israel’s political opposition in sharply criticizing the government.

One Afula resident, who identified herself as Ricki Sabag, told Israel Army Radio: “Rabin is a partner to this murder. . . . In my opinion, he must go home and free the post for people stronger than he.”

At one point, Micha Goldman, Rabin’s deputy education minister who represented the government at the Afula funerals, was cursed and attacked by several mourners. He was removed for his own safety after Goldman declared: “The government of Israel will not allow murderers--the murderers of Israel, the murderers of peace--any rest! We will pursue them ceaselessly.”

The tone was markedly different, though equally pain-filled, among friends and family at the funeral of Ishai Gedassi.

He is the 31-year-old father of five who was gunned down Thursday morning while hitchhiking in Ashdod. As they laid the former soldier to rest at his kibbutz, Gedassi’s friend Shlomo Anexter described him as “a central figure” in the struggle for peace. “He wanted peace. He was willing to do a lot for it,” Anexter said. “I think that this was a little too much, though.”

But Israel’s top military leaders said there is little or nothing that can be done to stop terrorist killings.

Gen. Ehud Barak, Israel’s chief of staff and its most senior military commander, said Wednesday’s suicide bombing and Thursday’s drive-by killing are terrorist acts impossible to avert.

He explained that the blanket security order he issued for the territories Thursday was a further attempt to defend against Hamas’ vow of similar attacks to come.

But Palestinian leaders and Israeli human rights groups denounced as “unjust” the comprehensive closure order, which a spokesman for Israeli authorities in the West Bank said canceled nearly 20,000 special travel permits.

Only about 1,000 permits allowing passage “for humanitarian reasons”--for individuals such as doctors, ambulance drivers and patients in need of special medical care--will be exempted, said a spokesman for the Civil Administration, Israel’s military authority in the West Bank.

“We think that the closure is an act of collective punishment--it’s not justified,” declared B’tselem, the Israeli human rights group, adding that the security order has deprived tens of thousands of impoverished Palestinians of their only source of income in Israel.

Israel and the PLO

As an official PLO announcement from Tunis, Tunisia, expressed regret for the continuing Palestinian violence against Israelis, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin scheduled an emergency meeting of his Cabinet’s security committee today.

Rabin also met for several hours with the Israeli delegation, which is in the final stages of negotiating an agreement with the PLO for Palestinian autonomy and Israeli withdrawal from the occupied Gaza Strip and the West Bank town of Jericho.

Rabin’s government continued to resist mounting efforts by Israel’s right-wing opposition and one of his own Cabinet members for an immediate suspension of the talks with the PLO.

“The government is responsible for the deterioration in the personal security of the citizens of Israel and for its unprecedented low point since the establishment of the state,” declared Benjamin Netanyahu, chairman of the opposition Likud Party.

Rafael Eitan, who heads the opposition Tsomet Party, observed: “The government is paralyzed. It is the obligation of the government to immediately suspend the talks with the terrorists.”

But several key government officials indicated that the Israeli delegation still plans to return to bargaining with the PLO at a scheduled session Sunday in Cairo. Only through a final agreement and concrete changes in the territories, they said, can the government neutralize the threat from armed extremists who are trying to destroy the peace process.

Expressing “sorrow” over Arafat’s initial silence amid the carnage, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, a chief architect of the peace process, said after an emergency meeting of the ruling Labor Party, “We have to be clear: Just as we will not hesitate to employ every method against terrorism, we will not stop for a minute the negotiations for an agreement on Gaza and Jericho.”

Despite the government’s commitment to the peace process, there was almost universal Israeli condemnation of Arafat’s failure to condemn or even comment publicly on the continuing slaughter of Israelis by Hamas--a rival Palestinian faction that opposes Arafat’s Fatah faction and his peace efforts with Israel.