Attack in Israel Kills 19, Hurts 100

On one of Judaism’s holiest nights, a Palestinian carrying a suitcase of explosives blew himself up Wednesday inside a hotel dining hall packed with families gathering to share the Passover Seder.

At least 19 people were killed, including the bomber, and more than 100 were injured in the attack in the coastal city of Netanya. The bombing was the deadliest suicide attack in Israel in 10 months and one that will have far-reaching consequences for Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians.

The carnage could demolish U.S. efforts to broker a cease-fire and could unleash a new phase in a conflict that has already claimed more than 1,500 lives in 18 months. More than military retaliation, Israel is considering launching another massive campaign of incursions and raids across the West Bank and Gaza Strip, army officers said.

“This is not just terror,” Public Security Minister Uzi Landau said. “This is a massacre.”

Among the dead, dying and wounded in Wednesday’s Passover bombing were entire families, Israelis and foreign Jews visiting for the holiday. The force of the ferocious blast devastated the dining hall, knocked down the facade of the hotel lobby, shredded the paneled ceiling inside and crumpled cars parked on the street.

Blood-spattered victims staggered in a daze from the stricken Park Hotel on Netanya’s boardwalk. The dead were lined up in body bags on the asphalt.

Hospitals were overwhelmed, setting up triage in their synagogues and shuffling the less seriously wounded to their cafeterias. As is usually the case, the bomb contained nails and other metal pieces to boost its lethal impact.

The radical Islamic organization Hamas claimed responsibility for the blast. But Israel blamed Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat and said he will pay the price.

Landau said it was time to destroy or disarm all Palestinian security forces, many of which Israel accuses of engaging in terrorism. “We should go back into the territories to ensure that the [Israeli army] remains the only armed force,” he said. “Not just go in and out--we must go in and stay in until the job is done.”

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, at his Negev desert ranch for the holiday, held urgent consultations with his security chiefs and will “reconsider Israel’s overall policy” of relative restraint in recent weeks, spokesman Raanan Gissin said.

Arafat condemned the attack, saying it was aimed at undermining both the Arab League summit underway in Beirut and the truce-seeking mission of U.S. special envoy Anthony C. Zinni. Arafat vowed to arrest those responsible, although his previous promises have gone unfulfilled.

Both Arafat and Sharon were reported to have spoken by phone with Zinni, whose mission was already virtually paralyzed by difficulties in bringing the two sides any closer to accepting a CIA-drafted truce plan.

After the bombing, President Bush once again called on Arafat to do all in his power to stop the escalating cycle of bloodshed.

“This callous, this coldblooded killing must stop. I condemn it in the strongest terms. I call upon Arafat and the Palestinian Authority to do everything in their power to stop the terrorist killing, because there are people in the Middle East who would rather kill than have peace,” Bush said during a stop in Atlanta.

In Washington, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said the bloodshed by extremists hurts the Palestinian cause.

“This sort of activity and the tolerance of this sort of activity will destroy the very vision that the Palestinian Authority stands for and Chairman Arafat says he is committed to,” Powell said.

Powell formally labeled an Arafat-linked militia a terrorist organization Wednesday. The Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a branch of Arafat’s Fatah organization, last week claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing at a Jerusalem shopping mall that killed three Israelis and injured more than 60.

Wednesday’s bomber, identified by Hamas as Abdel-Basset Odeh, 23, of the West Bank town of Tulkarm, timed his entry into the hotel lobby to the hour that about 250 people were arriving from synagogue prayers and sitting down to the traditional meal that opens the eight-day Passover holiday.

Odeh, wearing a black coat and possibly a wig, quickly aroused the suspicions of the Landerlok family visiting from Sweden. He entered the dining hall, the Landerloks told reporters, and pretended to look for a table in the lower level where the Seder was taking place. He was the only single man among a sea of families.

“We were about to sit down when my father saw him and told me, ‘Come here, there is something strange about that man over there,’ ” said Yoel Landerlok, 20, a yeshiva student who was attending the Seder with his parents and two younger siblings. “When he was three tables from us, there was a terrible explosion. Everyone was thrown to the ground. A huge hole opened in the wall near us.”

He grabbed his brother and sister and ran. Only later, in Netanya’s crowded, frantic Laniado Hospital, were the children reunited with their parents.

Across Israel, families starting their Seder reading of the Haggadah, about the delivery of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt to the Promised Land, were instead tuning in to television news reports, horrifically familiar in their chaotic detail of blaring sirens, flashing lights and rescue workers picking up the dead.

For all its military might, Israel has not been able to stop suicide bombers. Polls show that Palestinians--besieged by Israeli military blockades and aerial bombardments--give ample support for attacks against Israelis. Arafat exercises only nominal control over the most extreme elements of his people, many of whom believe that suicide bombings are starting to have the desired effect by exacting a painful price on Israeli society, its economy and its spirit.

“I think the Israeli people cannot take this indefinitely,” senior Hamas official Ismail Haniyeh said Wednesday in Gaza. “Anyone reading the Israeli newspapers can see their suffering. They love life more than any other people, and they prefer not to die.”

Across the West Bank and Gaza Strip this week, street demonstrations have demanded that Arab leaders meeting in Beirut deliver more weapons, not peace.

Even before the Passover massacre, Sharon--his standing in the polls at a new low--was being pulled harder to the right, closer to his own natural instincts, by the hawks and hard-liners who dominate his government. They are increasingly demanding tougher, more decisive action--a large-scale military operation that will crush Palestinian resistance once and for all, and quickly.

Sharon convened his security Cabinet this week to go over the plans for the next phase of the conflict, which aides said the prime minister had expected would become necessary because of the likelihood that both the Arab summit and Palestinian cease-fire negotiations would fail.

Gissin, Sharon’s spokesman, said the government had informed Washington when Zinni arrived this month that “if we face a major attack like this one, we reserve the right to take military action.”

Any future Israeli action is most likely to be a reprise of the offensive that Israel launched Feb. 28, the largest military operation staged by the Israeli army in the West Bank and Gaza since capturing those territories in the 1967 Middle East War. Israel sent 20,000 troops to invade Palestinian cities, raid refugee camps, round up hundreds of men and confiscate weapons.

The next reoccupation would probably go deeper and last longer. A senior security official, speaking earlier this week, said the operations in the first two weeks of March--which drew U.S. criticism for their harsh treatment of civilians--succeeded in stopping at least some Palestinian suicide bombers. For example, the official said, no attacks originated in Ramallah during Israel’s three-day invasion of that West Bank city; as soon as troops left, the assailants headed again from Ramallah for Jerusalem.

“Reoccupying Palestinian cities is not the ultimate military solution, and of course it’s not a political solution, but it can be very effective at reducing attacks,” the official said. “Israeli presence has its advantages.”

Netanya, the site of Wednesday’s devastation, has been hit by several attacks in the last year and a half. It sits just six miles west of the West Bank, and keeping Palestinians out has proved impossible.

Media reports said Odeh, the bomber, had worked in hotels in Netanya and was on a list of men Israel wanted arrested. A security guard posted at the front door of the Park Hotel on Wednesday night failed to notice or stop him. A clerk at the reception desk did notice Odeh and tried to ask him what he wanted and where he was going.

He didn’t answer and instead bolted toward the crowded dining hall.

Times staff writer Robin Wright in Washington contributed to this report.