Suicide Bombing Kills 2 Israelis and Injures 15

JERUSALEM -- A Palestinian suicide bomber made his way to the edge of an open-air shopping mall in a leafy Tel Aviv bedroom community at dusk Monday and detonated a bomb strapped to his body, killing two Israelis and injuring at least 15 others, including two infants.

A security guard, who was one of those killed, managed to block the bomber from entering the mall and causing many more casualties, authorities said.

The latest violence came against a backdrop of political drama triggered by the collapse last week of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s alliance with the left-center Labor Party, which pulled out of his coalition and left him without a parliamentary majority. Israeli television reported this morning that Sharon will announce today that he intends to call early elections.

The report said Sharon had told President Moshe Katsav he intends to set elections for February, nine months ahead of schedule.

Monday’s bombing came as Sharon’s minority government survived a succession of three no-confidence votes in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, only moments before the suicide attack in the central city of Kfar Sava, six miles from Tel Aviv. It was the second suicide bombing aimed at Israelis in nine days.

The parliamentary proceedings, said Cabinet Minister Danny Naveh, were held “in the suffocating atmosphere of a new attack ... a new reminder that we are still facing a war of terror.”

Initial reports of the suicide blast were just filtering in as Lt. Gen. Shaul Mofaz, the architect of some of Israel’s harshest measures against the Palestinians, was sworn in as Sharon’s new defense minister.

Mofaz’s term as military chief of staff ended in July, raising unease in some quarters that the transition period was too short between his army career, in which he oversaw day-to-day Israeli operations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and his new Cabinet position, in which he will be involved in making policy regarding the Palestinians.

“It is totally unhealthy!” said lawmaker Yossi Sarid, whose left-leaning Meretz Party led the fight against Mofaz’s confirmation and also spearheaded the no-confidence votes against Sharon. “Orderly countries know that military men, especially if they took off their uniform only three months before, are not appointed to the position of defense minister, creating the impression that Israel is supposedly ruled by a military junta.”

In what might have been a continuation of a controversial policy that flourished under Mofaz, a member of the militant Islamic group Hamas and one other Palestinian died in an explosion that ripped through the van they were driving in the West Bank city of Nablus.

Palestinians denounced the incident as an assassination -- one of dozens of targeted killings in the last two years of Palestinian militant leaders blamed for planning or carrying out attacks on Israelis. The chief of Palestinian intelligence in Nablus, Moeen Sakaran, said he believed the vehicle had been booby-trapped and blown up by remote control.

The Israeli military, which rarely acknowledges carrying out such killings, had no comment. One of the dead Palestinians was identified as Hamad Sadr, a member of the military wing of Hamas. Sadr was an uncle of Mohammed Bostami, a Palestinian who carried out a suicide attack last week in the West Bank settlement of Ariel that killed three Israeli soldiers.

Monday’s blast in Kfar Sava, which lies close to the West Bank, came at a busy time of day at the palm-shaded Akim shopping mall.

The airy passageways were full of adults who had gotten off work in time to run a few errands and of high-school kids drawn to the mall’s video arcades, fast-food joints and chain stores.

An electronics store took the brunt of the explosion, which left the mall walkway littered with broken glass and pieces of scorched appliances.

“I saw a guy bleeding, lying in a pool of blood, and a leg that wasn’t his next to him,” witness Ron Kenzi told Israeli radio.

“The shock wave was huge and hit us very hard,” a 12-year-old named Danna Seton said from her hospital bed.

Authorities said a security guard, one of two dozen on duty at the mall, had apparently spotted the bomber and moved to intercept him, but the man managed to detonate more than 20 pounds of explosives strapped around his waist.

In addition to the bomber and the guard, a bystander died. The body of the bystander was so mutilated that authorities were not certain whether the victim was a man or a woman.

Authorities said the blast’s destruction would have been magnified in a confined space; in the open air, it was lessened.

The bomber was identified by Israel as Nabil Sawalha, from the Balata refugee camp outside Nablus. He was believed to be a member of the militant Islamic Jihad, which has been responsible for scores of deadly attacks.

In Washington, the State Department cited the attack in urging Americans in the Middle East to exercise caution. “We obviously condemn these kinds of activities in the strongest possible terms,” said spokesman Richard Boucher.

Israeli authorities characterized the attack as graphic proof of the threat faced every day throughout the country.

“Somebody put on a suicide belt and walked into the heart of a shopping center with the hope of killing as many Israeli men, women and children as possible,” said Foreign Ministry spokesman Daniel Taub. “This is plain and simple terror, and if we don’t fight it with every means at our disposal, it’s going to win.”

Palestinians have been expressing fears that a new Sharon government will tighten the hold that Israel’s military already has on the West Bank’s major cities. Israel says strict control over Palestinians’ movements has lessened the toll of suicide attacks; Palestinians say constant curfews and travel restrictions make daily life a misery.

Sharon, who was fighting to rebuild a parliamentary majority, had been seeking the support of a far-right party, Yisrael Beiteinu, which supports the expansion of Jewish settlements and rejects any peace overtures toward the Palestinians.

But the party demanded that Sharon adopt some of its hard-line policies, including formally rescinding the 1993 Oslo peace accords. Sharon said he would not agree to that.

Amid the wrangling, Israel’s first openly gay lawmaker, 62-year-old university professor Uzi Even, was sworn in Monday, replacing a Knesset member who resigned. Ultra-Orthodox Jewish lawmakers staged a walkout when Even stood up to deliver his inaugural remarks.