U.S. Push for Truce Continues in Mideast

U.S. efforts to achieve a cease-fire in Israeli-Palestinian fighting gained momentum Sunday despite a Palestinian shooting attack that claimed the life of an Israeli teenager, a suicide bombing in Jerusalem and an Israeli incursion into Bethlehem.

Israeli and Palestinian security officials held talks Sunday night at the urging of U.S. envoy Anthony C. Zinni, who said he was determined not to let violence undermine his efforts to quell the fighting that has raged here for nearly 18 months.

“These attacks will not deter my efforts to continue to work with both sides to bring the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation to an end,” the retired Marine Corps general said in a statement released by the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv after the shooting in the central Israeli town of Kfar Sava. “At the same time, it is critical that the Palestinian Authority take responsibility and act against terror and punish those responsible. Now is the time to get a cease-fire.”

A senior Palestinian official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the security meetings were technical talks on Israel’s withdrawal from all Palestinian-controlled territories as a prelude to a cease-fire.

In Bahrain, Vice President Dick Cheney said he hoped the U.S. mission will bear fruit by the time he lands here for talks today.

Hours before Zinni held his third meeting in four days with Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat in the West Bank city of Ramallah, a Palestinian opened fire with a pistol on a main street in Kfar Sava.

The attacker fired two clips at passersby, many of them teenagers from a nearby high school who were on their lunch break. Amar Shakhshear, 25, shot Noa Orbach, 18, to death and wounded 15 other people before he was gunned down by bystanders and police officers. The Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a militia linked to Arafat’s Fatah movement, later said he was a member but had acted on his own.

Speaking to Israel Radio, the dead girl’s brother, Amit Orbach, captured the growing sense of helplessness Israelis feel in the face of recent bombings and shootings.

“My brother is getting out of the army today after being a warrior in Lebanon,” Orbach said. “Nothing happened to him there, and here a girl goes to school and doesn’t come home.”

Two hours after the shooting, a Palestinian carrying a bomb threw himself at a municipal bus in Jerusalem’s French Hill neighborhood, blowing himself to pieces and slightly wounding several people. Islamic Jihad, a militant Islamic group, took responsibility for the attack.

The force of the blast hurled part of the bomber’s body through the front windshield of the bus, Jerusalem police spokesman Gil Kleiman said.

“I saw the No. 22 bus waiting for the red light,” witness Eran Maor said. “There was a big explosion. I saw smoke rising from the bus, and I saw people in shock. Many of them were covered with bits of flesh. I think the flesh belonged to the terrorist.”

The shooting and bus bombing came after two days of relative quiet but as Israeli security agencies warned that more attacks were imminent. In the north, the mayor of Nahariya, on the coast near the border with Lebanon, took the unusual step of canceling school for the day and telling residents to stay inside because of warnings of a possible infiltration from Lebanon.

Meanwhile, Israeli troops and tanks briefly rolled into the center of Bethlehem in the West Bank, waging fierce gun battles with Palestinian fighters near the Church of the Nativity, on the site where Christians believe Jesus was born, and killing a gunman affiliated with the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade before withdrawing.

Palestinian officials have said they will not hold cease-fire talks with the Israelis until they withdraw from all Palestinian-controlled territories. Israel launched a massive military offensive in Palestinian cities, villages and refugee camps just over two weeks ago, saying it wanted to break the back of the “terrorist infrastructure” and inflict casualties as the prelude to a cease-fire.

In a statement issued Sunday night, the Israeli Defense Ministry said the security talks being held were between field-level commanders and were meant “to begin a process of cooling things down.”