Terror Against Israelis Ebbs, Changes Character

As a grenade attack at a crowded bus station showed this week, extremists who until recently terrorized Israel with suicide bombings are increasingly forced to limit themselves to hit-and-run assaults that claim fewer lives but are more difficult to prevent, Israeli authorities say.

Security, always at the core of Israeli demands in negotiations with the Palestinians, is again the central issue at the U.S.-sponsored summit at the Wye Plantation in Maryland, which was in its sixth day Tuesday.

When a man identified by police as a Palestinian injured dozens of Israelis with two grenades at the bus station in southern Israel on Monday, Israel’s summit delegation immediately threatened to call off all talks except those directly related to security.

The reality is that this year has been relatively tranquil in Israel. Terrorism by no means has been conquered, but the eight Israelis who have been killed in terrorist attacks so far in 1998 are a smaller number than in recent years, according to government figures.

Israeli authorities claim credit for reducing terrorist deaths through good intelligence and relentless vigilance. Under the tutelage of the CIA, Palestinian security forces cooperate with Israeli forces in some cases, although both American and Israeli officials say the Palestinians need to do more.

Israeli military and police officials say that stepped-up security has prevented suicide bombers from infiltrating explosives into Israel from the Gaza Strip and Palestinian-controlled areas of the West Bank and that the result has been a shift from large-scale attacks to smaller ones that usually involve stabbings, grenades or small-arms fire.

Scores of Israelis have been wounded this year, including 64 in Monday’s bus station attack, and eight have died, according to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office. That’s the smallest number since the Oslo peace accords, which offered land for peace, were signed in September 1993. This year’s fatalities have included a rabbi, a female soldier stabbed to death and a young Orthodox Jewish man shot as he participated in a ritual cleansing at a rural spring.

Last year, 29 Israelis were killed in terrorist attacks, including 16 who were blown up by two suicide bombers in a crowded Jerusalem market in July; 77 died in terrorist attacks in 1996, while 15 soldiers were killed in Palestinian rioting. In 1995, 52 Israelis were killed, and 73 died in 1994.

“Recently, a number of attacks have been foiled,” national police commissioner Yehuda Wilk said this week. “Unfortunately, we also witness a number of incidents in which they [terrorists] succeed in launching attacks, maybe less grave in nature than those they would like to launch, but we perceive any attack as serious. . . . There has been extensive and serious work done by all the security community, and this is bearing results.”

Netanyahu is refusing to cede any additional West Bank land to the Palestinians until Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat agrees to a concrete plan to combat terrorism. The Israeli government is demanding that Arafat dismantle the vast network used by the militant Islamic movement Hamas, which openly opposes peace with Israel.

Arafat and his advisors maintain they are making a “100% effort” but that the kinds of attacks that are on the rise--the sporadic grenade or knife assaults--are nearly impossible to prevent.

“We cannot be expected to put a security officer on every Palestinian living under our control,” Jibril Rajoub, Arafat’s senior police official in the West Bank, told reporters in the Palestinian-controlled city of Ramallah.

The suspect in Monday’s bus station blast, who is in custody, was identified as a longtime Hamas member from a unit involved in the rabbi slaying and in a grenade attack that wounded 13 soldiers and border police last month on Yom Kippur. Israeli authorities said the man came from the section of the West Bank city of Hebron that Israel handed over to the Palestinians last year.

Palestinian officials predicted that Netanyahu will use the bus station incident to justify refusing to reach an agreement at the Maryland summit.

And in the bitter back-and-forth between senior Israeli and Palestinian officials, Netanyahu’s spokesman called Arafat’s failure to cooperate on security a “signal to terrorists to continue to act.”

“You cannot control the last fanatic and the last criminal and the last nut anywhere and everywhere in the world,” Netanyahu spokesman David Bar-Illan said, “but you can invest the kind of effort that would discourage [terrorists] and make it difficult for them to operate. The behavior on the part of the Palestinian Authority can only encourage them.”

Many in Israel say that one need look no further than the failure of the peace process to find an explanation for the low incidence of terrorist attacks. Extremists who oppose peace need not bother to execute large operations, since the politicians seem to be doing such a good job of undermining peace accords on their own. Then, when a chance for progress looms on the horizon, extremists jump into action.

Gen. Amos Malka, head of military intelligence, told a parliamentary committee Tuesday that army counter-terrorism operations, including the killing of several key Hamas militants in recent months, have reduced Hamas’ ability to carry out massive attacks.

Malka said the Palestinian Authority has cooperated in limited operations, but usually after a tip from the Israelis or under pressure from American officials. He cautioned that while Hamas may seem less active, it still possesses the infrastructure and the will to strike.

Hamas founder Sheik Ahmed Yassin, speaking to reporters earlier this month, complained that “security cooperation between Israel, the United States and the Palestinian Authority” had placed “obstacles” in the path of Hamas fighters.

“But I insist,” he said, “that no matter how much these activities are delayed, they will not be stopped.”

Times staff writer Rebecca Trounson contributed to this report.

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Casualties of Terror

Scores of Israelis have been wounded in terrorist attacks this year, but only eight have died. That’s the smallest number since the Oslo peace accords in 1993. Israel primarily credits increased vigilance for the drop in deaths.

Source: Israeli prime minister’s office

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