Palestinian Slain During Suicide Bombing Attempt

Shoppers crowding the supermarket in Efrat, a Jewish settlement in the West Bank, heard a pop from the bread section Friday morning and then noticed a Palestinian suicide bomber trying to blow himself up.

One of the settlers and a guard quickly whipped out their pistols and shot the man to death, averting what authorities said would have been a disastrous explosion in a market bustling ahead of the Jewish Sabbath.

It was the second time in seven days that a Palestinian had entered a settlement with the purpose of detonating a bomb to kill himself and as many Jews as possible, and it underscored a recent shift by Palestinian militants to focus their attacks on settlers and soldiers inside the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Later, an Israeli was shot and killed, presumably by Palestinian gunmen, as he drove on a road north of Jerusalem used by settlers to bypass Arab villages, the army said.

In a separate incident, a Jewish settler was badly injured by Israeli troops after the man stopped his car and opened fire on what he claimed were Palestinian gunmen. The army said it mistook the settler for a Palestinian and shot him. Soldiers, realizing their mistake, later scoured the nearest Palestinian neighborhood and found a fake plastic gun, the army said.

The Efrat bomb incident also exposed flaws in a plan by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to carve out buffer zones throughout the region to divide Israelis and Palestinians. About 200,000 Israeli Jews live in more than 140 settlements scattered throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and Sharon has offered no explanation of how a buffer zone can protect settlements if they are left intact.

Sharon reiterated the government’s intention to establish “security separation” in a speech Thursday night. Billed as a major address to his increasingly despondent people, the comments were widely condemned Friday from the right, left and center as uninspiring, insufficient and vague at a time when strong leadership is desperately needed.

“The lion that meowed,” is how commentator Yoel Marcus put it in a front-page editorial in the influential Haaretz daily.

A poll published Friday in Israel’s largest newspaper, Yediot Aharonot, said Sharon’s credibility among Israelis had plunged from 70% in December to 54% this month. Until now, Sharon had enjoyed consistently high approval ratings since his landslide election a year ago. With the death toll mounting in a 17-month-old conflict that has already claimed more than 1,100 lives on both sides, confidence in Sharon is clearly slipping.

Eve Harow, a spokeswoman for Jewish settlers who lives in Efrat, said she was disappointed that Sharon’s speech didn’t go far enough. As far as she is concerned, Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat is an “enemy” who “must be removed from the scene.”

Harow said the attempted suicide bombing at the Efrat supermarket earlier in the day further riled and unnerved the settlers, who are afraid that Sharon’s proposed buffer zones will offer little protection.

“Is it an inch-wide buffer zone, a mile-wide buffer zone? Is it a fence, a border, a minefield?” said Harow, who moved to Efrat from Los Angeles 14 years ago. “Efrat abuts . . . [the Palestinian-ruled town of] Bethlehem. Where’s the buffer zone?”

Although Sharon offered no details, Israeli media reported Friday that the cordon would run parallel to the line that represents Israel’s pre-1967 border but cut a couple of miles deeper into Palestinian territory and will be fortified by electric fences, concrete blocks, sensors, mines, trenches, regular army patrols and other obstacles.

Palestinians fear that the buffer zones would further slice up their territory and corral 3 million Palestinians into disconnected ghettos instead of a viable future state. Many on the Israeli left maintain that only the dismantling of the settlements--built on land that Israel captured in 1967 and considered illegal under international law--and withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza Strip will lead to peace with the Palestinians.

The Yediot Aharonot poll showed majority support for evacuating all settlements in Gaza (57%) and some or all in the West Bank (59%).

Palestinian fighters regard settlers and settlements as legitimate targets, along with soldiers, even though many settlers are not armed.

Meanwhile, Harow and other settlers are worried about how the attacker entered Efrat, which, like many settlements, is guarded by the military. Several residents said they believe that the man, later identified as Mohammed Ashimari, 22, from the nearby village of Adoha, was one of dozens of Palestinians who had entry permits as part of a construction crew. Police said that they found a belt of explosives on his body and that he may have also left a bomb on a grocery shelf.

Despite international pressure not to expand the settlements, many of the enclaves are rapidly building new homes, and they employ Palestinians for the job.

Harow and other settlers said the escalating violence will force them to reassess whether they should continue to employ Palestinian workers.

“The time has come for all of us to realize that apparently none of them can be trusted,” Hisdai Eliezer, head of a security committee for settlements, told Israeli radio.