Bombing Leaves Scars on Another Israeli Town

The mayor of this prosperous coastal town comes to work each day with a pistol strapped to his hip and has ordered every municipal worker who has served in an army combat unit and has a gun permit to do the same.

“I issued the order a month ago,” said Meir Nitzan, a button-down, bespectacled septuagenarian who is an unlikely-looking gunslinger.

“We realized that people who are by chance in the spot where terror attacks occur, if they are armed, might be able to shoot the terrorist. You don’t know where it may happen or when it may happen, so you have to be prepared.”

But nothing prepared anyone here for what happened Tuesday night when a Palestinian walked into the Sheffield Snooker Club and Cafeteria and detonated explosives around his waist, killing himself and 14 Israeli patrons. Another Israeli victim died on the operating table early Wednesday morning.

In an instant, the club was reduced to twisted steel and shattered bodies, and Rishon Le Zion was ushered into the sad and growing club of seemingly ordinary Israeli communities scarred by terrorist attacks.

The blast ended a nearly monthlong respite from suicide bombings, a break that had given some Israelis the courage to head back to entertainment spots many had abandoned. The attack also sparked calls within the Israeli government to banish Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat from the West Bank and Gaza Strip forever.

The diplomatic implications of Tuesday’s bombing were far from the minds of Rishon residents Wednesday, however. Many of them could be found visiting the wounded in hospitals, saying goodbye to the dead at cemeteries and comforting the survivors in homes plunged into mourning.

Nitzan visited some residents who were among 31 wounded in the attack and attended the first of four funerals scheduled for victims who were from Rishon. The other slain residents were due to be buried today, at least two in the town’s tree-shaded cemetery.

“I wish I could carry flowers instead of a gun,” the mayor said as he waited with a crowd for the body of 56-year-old Dalia Masa to arrive from the national morgue. “But I cannot carry flowers in these days. As they say: If you want peace, be ready for war.”

The fighting that erupted between Israelis and Palestinians in September 2000 first directly touched this town in March. Seven members of the Nehmad family died in a Jerusalem bombing. Two soldiers from Rishon were killed in the West Bank.

In an interview with The Times then, Nitzan said he was thankful that his town had escaped months of bloodshed without an attack inside its boundaries.

The community’s luck ran out Tuesday in a part of town where factories, nightclubs, wedding halls and restaurants line the streets, attracting patrons from communities miles away. The snooker club was a slightly seedy illegal gambling hall, a place that attracted low-income people looking to play slot machines or snooker, to have a beer and a sandwich. The municipality, Nitzan said, had waged legal battles with the owner for years in an effort to close the place.

Daniel and Anat Tramporosh stumbled across it Tuesday about half an hour before the bomber walked through the door and blew their lives apart. The couple had mostly stayed home during the long months of trouble because Anat was afraid of attacks, said Gila Tramporosh, Daniel’s mother.

“But they were tired of sitting in the house,” she said. “How long could they stay in their home? Sometimes a person thinks: What can happen? This is Rishon Le Zion.”

Besides, things had been quieter since the army launched a massive military sweep through the West Bank on March 29, arresting or killing scores of Palestinian militants, confiscating weapons and destroying makeshift explosives factories.

The couple took Anat’s mother, Hana Almasioy Gohen, and Anat’s younger sister out for coffee. They noticed the third-floor snooker club and decided to have a look.

The blast blew all four out of their chairs at the table they shared. With a tremendous roar, the ceiling caved in and the room went dark. Screws packed around the bomb and other shrapnel tore into Daniel Tramporosh’s legs and abdomen, but he managed to crawl through the darkness and debris to his wife. He found her dead, her skull crushed by a block of concrete that had fallen from the ceiling. His mother-in-law and sister-in-law were wounded.

As Daniel Tramporosh lay awaiting surgery Wednesday, relatives held up his lightly injured but distraught mother-in-law as she walked slowly from her room to see him for the first time since the attack. She threw herself across his bed, screaming and crying.

“Anat! Anat! Anat!” Gohen wailed. “I wish it had been me instead, that I had died and it was she crying for me.”

“The children came to me and asked, ‘Where is Ima [Mother]?’” said Daniel Tramporosh, 35, his voice breaking with emotion. “They can’t believe that Ima is gone.” Married 12 years, the couple had three children, ages 11, 6 and 4.

“We don’t know what to do anymore,” said his aunt, Rahel Mor, as she sat in the hospital corridor and listened to Gohen’s anguished cries. “God help us to know what to do.”