3 Israelis Slain in Netanya Suicide Bombing

A Palestinian disguised as an Israeli soldier blew himself up Sunday in this city’s open-air market, killing three Israelis, wounding dozens and shattering a period of quiet that had lured many back to the public places they had shunned.

Netanya, nine miles west of the West Bank, has been the target of 11 Palestinian attacks in two years, including the March 27 suicide bombing at a hotel where families were gathered to celebrate Passover. That attack killed 29 and triggered a massive Israeli military sweep through the West Bank that ended earlier this month.

A second suicide bomber blew himself up during rush hour this morning but no one else was injured, Israel Radio said. According to initial reports, the man, who was on foot, detonated explosives strapped to his body as police approached at a busy intersection near the northern town of Afula.

Sunday’s bombing came as the Bush administration is pressuring Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat to rein in militants and restructure his security forces as a prelude to renewing talks with Israel. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has said Israel will not negotiate unless the conditions are met.

Both the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a left-wing faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and Hamas, a militant Islamic group, claimed responsibility for the bombing. The Palestinian Authority condemned it.

“The Palestinian leadership would like to stress its denouncement and condemnation of the terrorist attack against Israeli civilians in the market in Netanya,” the authority said in a statement issued by the official news agency, WAFA, Sunday night.

Israel Television reported that army intelligence believes the PFLP carried out the bombing. The organization has been demanding the release of its leader, Ahmad Saadat, whom Arafat agreed to incarcerate as part of a deal that ended Israel’s siege of Arafat’s Ramallah headquarters this month.

In Washington, Vice President Dick Cheney said there are some bombings Arafat cannot prevent.

“I think there clearly is a class of bombings that he can’t rein in,” Cheney said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Hezbollah, a Lebanese Shiite group, and Hamas are two organizations “that don’t come under his purview and that have in the past indicated they’re prepared to do everything they can to destroy the peace process,” Cheney said. “On the other hand, there have in the past been bombings by elements of Palestinian organizations that come under his control.”

Cheney warned that if suicide bombers “achieve their desired results” in the Middle East, it would increase the chances they would attempt such attacks in the United States.

Israeli security forces received a warning shortly before 4 p.m. that a suicide bomber had left the West Bank town of Tulkarm, heading for Israel’s heavily populated coastal plain on what is the first day of the workweek for Israelis. A massive manhunt was launched in several cities, including Netanya.

But it was too late.

A man wearing the olive-drab uniform of an Israeli soldier and a belt packed with explosives and nails got out of a taxi at Netanya’s colorful produce market about 4:30 p.m., a police spokesman said. He walked a short distance into the rows of stalls and detonated the belt, killing himself and two others.

Mayor Miriam Feierberg heard the blast from a few blocks away and ran toward the market.

“We knew about an hour before” that there might be an attack, Feierberg said. “The police tried to be in every place to prevent it, but they didn’t succeed.”

Rescue workers converged on the scene, where metal doors were twisted and torn amid undisturbed bins of cabbage, fennel bulbs and lettuce. Six people reportedly suffered serious injuries, and 28 were still in hospitals late Sunday night.

“I heard a loud explosion, and I saw my son was wounded,” said Zeev Holder, 49, who runs a coffee shop directly across from where the bomber detonated his explosives. Holder said his son, 21-year-old Motti Holder, was injured in the leg but kept telling him, “It’s OK, it’s OK.” Holder watched as his son was loaded into an ambulance, then waded into the chaotic scene to help other victims.

Amos Gilam, 28, a social worker, was in his third-floor apartment across the street from the market when he heard a huge blast.

“I was afraid to look outside because I knew it was a bombing,” Gilam said. When he did peep out the window, he said, “I saw people on the ground. People were screaming. I was in shock.”

Amos Soffer, 16, said he was walking alongside a man he thought to be a soldier when the man suddenly blew apart. The force of the blast knocked Soffer to the ground, and he suffered cuts on his arm and burns on his face.

Sunday’s attack was the first suicide bombing of an Israeli target since May 7, when a Palestinian blew himself up inside a pool hall in Rishon Le Zion, south of Tel Aviv, killing 15 Israelis.

Sharon cut short a visit to the United States and rushed back to Israel to prepare a retaliatory invasion of the Gaza Strip after the Rishon bombing. The operation was called off by Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, who said Cabinet ministers and senior officers had endangered the operation by leaking its details to the press.

At the time, Ben-Eliezer said the Gaza operation had merely been “postponed,” and tensions have been mounting in the narrow, crowded strip, a stronghold of Islamic militancy. On Sunday, a convoy of Jewish settlers came under fire from Palestinian gunmen between the settlement of Netzarim and the Karni crossing in Gaza. Four Israeli soldiers were injured in the gun battle that followed.

Late Sunday, Israeli armored personnel carriers briefly entered the West Bank city of Ramallah after shots were fired at an Israeli driving to a nearby settlement, an army spokeswoman said. The motorist was not hurt and the troops withdrew without any contact with Palestinians, she said.

Palestinians and the army said troops also entered Tulkarm late Sunday and arrested more than a dozen Palestinians before withdrawing. The army said the Palestinians were later released.

Israel is under pressure from the United States and the European Union to refrain from a wide-scale operation as diplomatic efforts to end the fighting that has raged since September 2000 intensify.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell has said CIA Director George J. Tenet will soon start pushing Israel and the Palestinians to renew security cooperation. President Bush has thrown his support behind efforts to convene an international peace conference, and has joined the governments calling on Arafat to reform his government.

Israel’s dovish foreign minister, Shimon Peres, is the latest to unveil a peace plan. In reports published in the Israeli press Sunday, Peres detailed understandings he reached with Palestinian Authority negotiator Ahmed Korei months ago. The plan calls for the myriad Palestinian security forces to become a single force, and for the Palestinian Authority to quickly declare a state on the land Palestinians now control in the West Bank and Gaza.

Peres acknowledged in an Israel Radio interview Sunday that Sharon, who has said he hopes to achieve long-term interim agreements with the Palestinians, disagrees with elements of his plan.

Maharaj reported from Netanya and Curtius from Jerusalem.