More Attacks Predicted After 2 Suicide Bombers Fail in Gaza

A pair of suicide bombings aimed at Israeli buses in the Gaza Strip on Thursday injured so few people that they probably will be repeated, a senior Palestinian security official predicted.

The only people killed in the morning attacks, which were one minute and half a mile apart near Jewish settlements, were the attackers. Eleven Israelis were slightly injured, including three soldiers.

No one initially claimed responsibility for the bombings. But then late Thursday, the militant Muslim group Islamic Jihad said it carried out the attacks. Hezbollah, a militant Lebanese Islamic movement, broadcast Islamic Jihad’s statement on its radio station.

Israeli and Palestinian security officials earlier had said they believed the attacks were carried out by Islamic Jihad, a group based in the Gaza Strip that blames Israel for the killing last week of its founder, Fathi Shikaki.

“Israel bears responsibility for the attack [on Shikaki],” Brig. Gen. Mousa Arafat, the Palestinian Authority’s intelligence chief, told Reuters news agency.

*

Israel has refused to confirm or deny whether its intelligence agency was responsible for shooting Shikaki to death on the island of Malta. But Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres have said they do not regret his demise.

Shikaki’s assassination will “widen the circle of violence and make the group’s followers more militant,” said Arafat, who is a cousin of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. “Islamic Jihad and the other groups are used to more spectacular attacks. They won’t be satisfied with attacks like today’s.”

Some Gazan political analysts said they believed that Islamic Jihad did not initially claim responsibility in Gaza for the attacks both because it feared retaliation by Israel or the Palestinian Authority, which governs Gaza, and because it was embarrassed by the way the Israeli soldiers escorting the two buses were able to keep the bombers far enough from the buses to blunt the impact of the explosions.

Israel imposed a partial closure of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank after Shikaki’s death was revealed Saturday and placed its army on high alert after Islamic Jihad blamed Israel.

“We were prepared for the possibility of an Islamic Jihad reaction,” said an Israeli army commander, Maj. Gen. Yitzhak Eitan. “We learned the appropriate lesson from the April 9th bombing . . . and we have minimized the traffic of buses and increased the security escort convoys and other security measures along the roads.”

Islamic Jihad’s April 9 attack involved a pair of suicide bombings near Jewish settlements in Gaza that killed eight people.

*

Thursday’s attacks came one day after 40,000 mourners attended Shikaki’s funeral in Damascus, Syria, and heard Islamic Jihad’s new leader, Ramadan Abdullah Shallah, deliver an impassioned speech threatening Israel and denouncing the Palestinian Authority.

Thursday also was the one-year anniversary of the slaying of another Islamic Jihad leader, Hani Abed, who died when his car blew up in the Gaza Strip. Islamic Jihad blamed Israel for his death, and the Israelis did not deny involvement.

One Palestinian security officer, speaking on condition of anonymity after Thursday’s attacks, predicted that the Palestinian Authority will start arresting Jihad activists in Gaza as a result of the latest bombings.