Bus ‘Terrorist’ Rams Israel Crowd; 9 Die

A passenger bus driven by a Palestinian man plowed into a crowd of Israeli soldiers and civilians at a bus stop south of Tel Aviv this morning, killing nine people and injuring 14 others in what police called a carefully planned terrorist attack.

Police chased the driver at high speed along a busy highway and wounded the suspect with gunfire before capturing him.

At the bus stop, bodies of soldiers and civilians lay by the roadside as paramedics treated survivors.

The bus had transported Palestinian workers from the Gaza Strip to Tel Aviv.

Police commissioner Shlomo Aharonishki said he was “absolutely certain that the hit and run was a terrorist attack.”

The bus attack came after Israeli military forces targeted and killed a senior officer of Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat’s elite bodyguard unit Tuesday in the Gaza Strip, firing several missiles at his car from two attack helicopters.

The slaying of 55-year-old Massoud Ayyad marked a return to Israel’s so-called liquidation policy of going after individual Palestinian militants. According to some estimates, that policy has been responsible for the deaths of 20 other Palestinians.

Ayyad’s death came amid a sharp escalation of violence throughout the West Bank and Gaza, where clashes between Israeli forces and Palestinians have intensified in the week since Ariel Sharon, the hawkish leader of the Likud Party, was elected prime minister. Palestinian gunmen appear to be challenging Sharon, who Tuesday continued efforts to form a coalition government with his Labor Party rivals.

In a separate incident, Palestinian police said a 14-year-old boy, Bilal Awad, was killed by Israeli fire as he rode his donkey cart along a junction near the Netzarim Jewish settlement in the center of Gaza. The army denied any involvement.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher condemned Tuesday’s violence, saying it marked a “serious deterioration of the security situation.”

Israel’s use of helicopter gunships and Palestinian attacks on Jewish settlements are producing “a new cycle of action or reaction which can become impossible to control,” he said.

The killing of Ayyad triggered protests throughout the West Bank and Gaza. The European Union, the Palestinian Authority and a leading human rights group condemned it.

“Killing people without a trial is plain wrong,” said Yael Stein, research director of B’Tselem, an Israeli organization that monitors human rights abuses in the West Bank and Gaza. “It’s illegal, no matter what the circumstances or the allegations against the people who are being killed.”

An Israeli army spokesman said that Ayyad was behind a rash of recent mortar attacks on Netzarim and that he was planning to kidnap Israeli soldiers. After months in which they used nothing more powerful than guns, Palestinians have fired mortars three times in the last two weeks.

Again Tuesday night, Palestinians fired antitank grenades at an Israeli army post in Gaza, army officials said.

Some leftist members of Israel’s parliament have added their voices to those of leaders of human rights groups in denouncing the hunting down of suspected Palestinian militants as an imposition of the death penalty without providing any evidence of wrongdoing.

Israel came under heavy criticism for the military’s Dec. 31 slaying of Thabet Thabet, a dentist and a senior West Bank official of Arafat’s Fatah movement.

Attorneys for Thabet’s widow, Siham, have petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court to stop “summary executions.”

Earlier this week, Israel asked the high court to reject Siham Thabet’s petition. In its first official defense of the policy, Israel declared that rules of war allow it to strike at people identified with absolute certainty as assailants.

“These people are the enemy . . . fighting against Israel,” Shai Nitzan, a lawyer with the attorney general’s office, said in a court brief, asking judges not to accept the widow’s petition.

But rights group B’Tselem said at least six innocent people, who had not been identified as terrorists, have lost their lives in such attacks.

The army has previously declined to provide any information on these “targeted shootings.” On Tuesday, it took the unusual step of calling a news conference to describe how soldiers conducted the latest attack and why it chose Ayyad.

Army spokesman Ron Kitrey said Ayyad, a lieutenant colonel in Fatah Force 17, headed a Gaza-based cell of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah blamed for a series of attacks on soldiers and Jewish settlers in Netzarim. No one was injured in those attacks, the spokesman said.

The targeting of Ayyad had the blessing of Israel’s outgoing prime minister, Ehud Barak, Kitrey said.

Barak’s office issued a statement calling the slaying “a clear message” to anyone planning to attack Israelis.

Witnesses said two army helicopters had been hovering nearby for about three hours before the 9:45 a.m. attack near the Erez crossing between Gaza and Israel.

The first rocket landed about three feet in front of Ayyad’s white Honda, causing him to jump out and take cover behind the vehicle. Israeli soldiers fired at least three more rockets, striking the car, witnesses said.

Ayyad’s body was trapped under the blackened, twisted metal of the vehicle. The force of the explosions shattered the windows of a few nearby houses and gouged small craters in the paved road.

Hundreds of Palestinians gathered at the scene soon afterward. One held aloft a bloody kaffiyeh taken from the wreckage.

In a statement, the Palestinian Authority said the attack was “further proof that Israel is determined to carry out its treacherous aggression on the Palestinian people.” It also denied that Ayyad was affiliated with Hezbollah, saying he had been a faithful member of Arafat’s Fatah movement for the past 30 years.

Meanwhile, Sharon moved closer to forming a unity government after an agreement Monday between his Likud Party and Barak’s Labor Party on guidelines for a coalition.

Several other issues must still be resolved, and Barak was close to accepting an offer to become Sharon’s defense minister, Israel Radio reported today.

Barring the unexpected, Sharon spokesman Raanan Gissin said, the coalition is all but a done deal.

“The major obstacles are removed,” Gissin said.

Ehud Olmert, the Likud mayor of Jerusalem, who is heading the negotiating team, said all that was left was for Sharon and Barak to meet to finalize the details.

But activists from Labor, which is deeply divided over joining a Sharon government, were less sanguine. They said important issues were unresolved.

The guidelines make formal a major retrenching of Israeli policy on peace with the Palestinians.

Under the agreement, the government would not pursue a comprehensive end to the conflict and would attempt only limited, interim accords. The guidelines commit neither to the evacuation of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza nor to the approval of an independent Palestinian state--key elements of Barak’s approach to peacemaking.

At Labor’s request, the guidelines also stay away from declaring Jerusalem the eternal and undivided capital of Israel.

Yossi Beilin, the dovish justice minister in Barak’s government, said Tuesday that he was appalled at the guidelines because they relinquish the goal of reaching a definitive, or “final status,” peace accord. He said Labor’s joining the Sharon government would be a “historic mistake.”

“Giving [Sharon] in advance the legitimacy to kill the dream of the final-status agreement between us and the Palestinians is like opening a chapter of blood,” Beilin told Israeli radio, “and we should not be part of this.”

The fighting continued late into the night as Israeli tanks fired machine guns and lobbed shells into neighborhoods of Khan Yunis in southern Gaza. At least 60 Palestinians were reported wounded.

After nightfall, Israeli soldiers and Palestinian snipers exchanged gunfire near Gilo, a Jewish neighborhood in a disputed part of Jerusalem.

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Times staff writer Tracy Wilkinson in Jerusalem and special correspondent Fayed abu Shamallah in Gaza contributed to this report.