Suicide Blast on Bus After Summit Kills 7

A suicide bomber killed at least seven passengers aboard a city bus at dawn today, hours after Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas met for the first top-level talks between their peoples in 31 months of incessant fighting.

The two statesmen debated privately for nearly three hours, but their fledgling attempts to broker peace were undermined by shooting attacks and bombings in the Palestinian territories and Jerusalem. Between sunset and sunrise, at least 11 people died and 20 were wounded in three suicide attacks. Against this belligerent backdrop, the prime ministers’ summit marked a return to negotiations that faded away in September 2000.

The meeting was “really not a matter of content or substance,” said Gilead Sher, an Israeli negotiator under former Prime Minister Ehud Barak. “It’s much more a matter of process, timing, effort and image.... The time will come for the content.”

Battle-weary Israelis and Palestinians, however, quietly dismissed the meeting as a cosmetic gesture belying a deeply entrenched stalemate. Widespread cynicism in this region has been deepened by continuing violence, by lingering disappointment at the unraveling of the 1993 Oslo peace accords and by the suspicion that Sharon and Abbas lack the political strength and will they would need to enforce peace.

“It’s a sham,” said Yaron Ezrahi, a political scientist at Hebrew University. “A puppet show.”

Day was just breaking after the Sharon-Abbas summit when the No. 6 bus pulled away from the curb and exploded. The bus full of commuters was headed downtown through the crowded streets of the city’s French Hill neighborhood; it was the first day of the Israeli workweek. The militant, clad in a Jewish prayer shawl and skullcap, climbed aboard and then set off a medium-sized bomb. About half an hour later, a second suicide bomber detonated explosives at a roadblock on the edge of the city, but managed to kill only himself.

An hour after the bus bombing, charred corpses still sat in their seats, heads blasted back. The force of the explosion twisted the back end of the bus down to the sidewalk. Rush hour traffic flowed by while rescue workers pulled plastic bags over the remains.

As news of the bombing reverberated around a weary Jerusalem, Sharon postponed his trip to Washington today. He had been scheduled to meet with President Bush to discuss a U.S.-backed peace plan. Instead, he called a Cabinet meeting to consider an Israeli response to the attacks.

The overnight killings shattered any notion that this region is uniformly prepared to talk peace, and drew a hard picture of ingrained animosities. Hard-line Palestinian militant groups have rejected Abbas, whom they regard as compromised by the U.S. and Israeli officials who pushed for his appointment, and they have threatened to undermine the beginnings of any peace process.

The peace talks were delicate all along -- the two leaders walked into Sharon’s heavily guarded Jerusalem offices with radically different agendas. Sharon has said he is unwilling to make compromises to achieve peace until Palestinian attacks on Israelis stop.

The Israeli prime minister wants Abbas to reform Palestinian security forces, confiscate weapons and bring muscle to bear on would-be snipers and suicide bombers.

“It’s the terrorism, stupid,” quipped Raanan Gissin, a spokesman for Sharon. “It’s not the road map.”

The “road map” is a three-phase peace plan that was unveiled last month and designed jointly by the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell traveled here last weekend to meet with both Sharon and Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, and persuade them to begin following the outline.

Skeptical Palestinians dismiss the Israeli demands as a stalling technique.

“Sharon’s main concern now is to find a way to escape from his obligations to the road map,” said Ghassan Khatib, the Palestinian Authority labor minister and a pollster. “He’ll try to engage Abu Mazen on anything else in order to go to Bush and say: ‘Wait a minute. We’re working on other things.’ ”

Abbas, according to associates, intended to urge Sharon to ease the harsh travel restrictions imposed on Palestinians and allow besieged Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat to leave his West Bank compound, where he has been a virtual prisoner for the last year. Most of all, Abbas was said to hope to sway Sharon to endorse the U.S.-backed peace plan unconditionally.

The Palestinians already have agreed to the terms of the road map, which would protect Israel from militants and set up a Palestinian state by 2005. But to Palestinians’ dismay, Israel has listed more than a dozen objections.

“The road map is for implementation, not for research or discussion,” Palestinian Information Minister Nabil Amr said Saturday. “We don’t fully trust Sharon.”

In the end, Abbas left Sharon’s office early today without persuading the prime minister to accept the peace plan. The Israeli premier had been expected to raise Israel’s reservations about the road map with Bush at the White House on Tuesday -- a prospect that had officials on both sides on edge -- and then hold more talks with Abbas.

The negotiations are jolting along against a backdrop of violence and strife. On Saturday, as nightfall ended the Jewish Sabbath, a militant disguised as a religious Jew slipped onto the streets of the contentious West Bank city of Hebron and blew himself up, killing a Jewish man and his pregnant wife.

Later, just as the leaders’ summit ended, two radicals were shot dead trying to infiltrate the West Bank settlement of Shaarei Tikva. In the Gaza Strip, Israeli soldiers killed a Palestinian gunman and wounded nine others in firefights, bringing to at least seven the number of Palestinians -- including two unarmed teens -- killed in Gaza on Friday and Saturday.

Since the war in Iraq, the U.S. has pushed hard to spur the long-stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Still, there is deep skepticism here about whether the U.S. commitment will be strong enough to prevail. During his visit last week, Powell also failed to persuade Sharon to accept the road map.

Meanwhile, cracks are showing in the new Palestinian leadership.

Hours before arriving at Sharon’s office Saturday, Abbas accepted the resignation of Saeb Erekat, who had been the Palestinians’ chief negotiator with the Israelis. Only weeks earlier, an ecstatic Erekat had called Abbas’ new government “a landmark in Palestinian history.”

The longtime negotiator is a close ally of Arafat, and Abbas’ job was created in part to satisfy the U.S. and Israeli desire for an alternative Palestinian leader. Arafat had been deemed corrupt and terrorism-friendly by both governments, which refused to negotiate with him.

Abbas is now under pressure to squeeze Arafat out of the picture altogether -- but he might not have the internal political power to do so. As president, Arafat still has the final word on all negotiations, not to mention authority over Abbas.

The Palestinian premier is also squeezed when it comes to security. The militant groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad rejected his appointment, and they scorn his willingness to negotiate with Israel. The latest attacks were part of bloody maneuvers seemingly timed to sabotage Abbas’ first stirrings of authority.

The battle has only begun. With the new Palestinian security chief, Mohammed Dahlan, Abbas is expected to go after the infrastructure of the militant groups in hard-core areas like Gaza and Hebron. If he forms a security force to take on the militants, Palestinian-on-Palestinian bloodshed is likely to be fierce. If he doesn’t, he is as likely to be written off as a failure by the United States and Israel.

Sharon is politically strapped too. Known as the military father of the Israeli settlement movement, the prime minister has begun this year to talk about leading his country through difficult sacrifices -- including the abandonment of some settlements -- in order to make peace.

But in a newspaper interview published last week, a sentimental Sharon spoke of the powerful ties that bind him to biblical land -- and backed away from the notion of dismantling any outposts.

Among Palestinian leaders, the gradual loss of turf to self-proclaimed Jewish pioneers is the most crucial hindrance to peace. Hill by hill, orchard by orchard, Palestinians have watched land come under the control of Jewish settlers, and they are desperate to stop the loss of territory.

“Nothing can happen until Sharon shows willingness to dismantle [the settlements], and he won’t do so,” said political scientist Ezrahi.

“If Sharon evacuates one remote settlement, then we can start talking about the peace process. Until then, you’re wasting your time.”

Analysts say Sharon can’t evacuate settlements without shattering his delicate government coalition and forcing Israel into elections. Sharon cobbled together a government this winter with religious lawmakers from the far right -- allies certain to rebel if he begins to empty settlements.

“The ideology and background of this right-wing government is completely incompatible with the peace process,” said Khatib, the Palestinian labor minister. “They believe [Palestinian territory] is the historic right of the Israeli people.”

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Times special correspondent Ruth Morris contributed to this report.