Mideast Foes Cooperate on Hamas Arrests

Israeli and Palestinian security officials have broken a Hamas military cell allegedly responsible for killing 11 Israelis, including three at a Tel Aviv cafe last month and a kidnapped soldier whose body was found Thursday.

The two sides worked together on this case under prodding from the United States, despite a general freeze in Palestinian security cooperation since Israel broke off peace negotiations over the cafe bombing on March 21.

The six-member Hamas cell was based in the West Bank villages of Zurif and Dura, near the embattled city of Hebron. Two members are in Israeli custody, two are in Palestinian custody and one is at large. The sixth died at Cafe Apropos in Tel Aviv when the bomb he was carrying in a bag apparently exploded prematurely.

Hamas, a group of Muslim militants opposed to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, claimed responsibility for the cafe bombing, which occurred shortly after Israel broke ground on a new Jewish neighborhood in historically Arab East Jerusalem.

Israeli security forces rounded up dozens of alleged accomplices of the cell of Hamas’ Iziddin al-Qassam military wing Thursday, as one of the suspects in custody pointed out the grave of an Israeli soldier missing since September.

Video footage released by the army and aired on Israeli television showed a handcuffed and chained Palestinian pointing to a patch of ground in an olive grove in Zurif and recounting how Sgt. Sharon Edri’s body had been dragged from a car and buried.

Israeli soldiers passed metal detectors over the spot and then began digging under the supervision of a military rabbi, unearthing a hand with a wristwatch before the tape ended.

Edri, 19, disappeared after hitchhiking from a bus stop outside the Tsrifin army base near Tel Aviv on Sept. 9. Members of the Hamas cell picked him up in a car with yellow Israeli license plates and fatally shot him within minutes, according to an official statement by the Israel Defense Forces.

The Hamas cell was also responsible for five drive-by shootings in the West Bank between November 1995 and July 1996 in which five Israeli civilians, a military doctor and an army medic were killed and three people were wounded, according to the release.

IDF spokesman Gen. Oded Ben-Ami said the group tried at least 10 other times to kidnap soldiers but was unsuccessful.

“This was their mode of operations until the bombing,” Ben-Ami said.

In March, according to the IDF statement, the unit “was instructed to place an explosive charge in a crowded location in Tel Aviv. For this purpose, the unit was given an explosive charge with a delaying device.”

The Hamas cell bought a car with Israeli license plates, and on March 21, two members drove with the bomb from Zurif to Tel Aviv, parking near Cafe Apropos, the statement said.

One of them, Moussa Ghneimat, set the delaying device and entered the cafe “with the intention of placing the bomb and leaving the site. Because of a fault, the bomb exploded before he could leave the cafe,” the statement said. Ghneimat’s cohort saw the explosion and returned to Zurif alone.

Three women were killed and 47 other people were wounded in the attack. Police had speculated that the bomber never intended to die because he carried identity papers and did not fit the profile of previous suicide bombers. He was married and a father and did not make a video explaining his intentions, as others have.

Neither the statement nor Ben-Ami said who gave the Hamas cell its orders and explosives.

“There are many details still under investigation,” Ben-Ami said.

The army said the rest of the cell’s members went underground in the Hebron area after the cafe bomber’s identity became known. Two of them were picked up by Israeli forces, which still control Zurif.

In a meeting that Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat and the chief of the Israeli General Security Service, Ami Ayalon, held with a CIA official on Tuesday night, Israel reportedly gave the Palestinians the identities of the other cell members. Two were subsequently apprehended, apparently around Dura, which is under Palestinian control.

Arafat also reportedly said at that meeting that he will try to prevent suicide bombings, according to Israeli and Palestinian officials.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has accused Arafat of giving a “green light” to terrorists, acknowledged that the Palestinian Authority had helped the Israelis in this case.

But Netanyahu qualified his praise, saying that the Palestinians have yet to resume full cooperation with Israel against terrorism.

The Palestinians say they will not resume full cooperation until political negotiations are resumed and the peace process is back on track. They have not launched the kind of mass arrests of hundreds of Muslim extremists that took place after a run of four suicide bombings by Hamas and Islamic Jihad in February and March 1996.

Palestinian police have, however, arrested four suspects in two bungled suicide-bombings outside Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip last week. Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the attacks in which the two bombers died.