Bomber Kills 19 at Israeli Restaurant

On the eve of Judaism’s holiest day, a young Palestinian woman walked into a beachfront restaurant full of diners Saturday and blew herself up, killing at least 19 other people -- several of them children -- in the deadliest such attack this city has seen.

The bombing immediately raised the prospect of tough Israeli action against Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, whom the Israeli government labels a sponsor of terrorism and vowed to “remove” after back-to-back suicide attacks nearly four weeks ago.

“This is an incident that cannot be ignored,” Israeli Health Minister Danny Naveh said. “This is our real opportunity to get rid of Arafat for once and for all.”

The bombing here turned a brilliant afternoon at the seaside into a grisly battlefield tableau, where the dead lay mangled and the wounded staggered through pools of blood and body parts. Wires dangled from the ceiling of the Maxim restaurant, while smoke wafted through its blown-out windows. Rescue workers combed the gutted eatery in search of survivors.

Israeli radio reported that among the victims were a baby and three other children, wrenched from families out for a day of relaxation and fun before the start of Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, which begins at sunset today.

In addition to those killed, dozens were injured.

Four Israeli Arabs were among the dead. Arabs make up a significant percentage of the population of Haifa, which has long enjoyed a reputation as a place of peaceful coexistence.

The militant group Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the bombing, which ended the relative calm that had prevailed in Israel since last month’s double attacks.

After the blast, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon convened an emergency meeting with security officials, who promised swift retaliation.

Shortly after midnight, Israeli helicopters fired missiles at two targets in the Gaza Strip. The home of an operative of the militant group Hamas, Monzer Kaneta, was hit in one of the strikes, but no one was inside. In the other strike, the home of another suspected militant near the Khan Yunis refugee camp was hit. It also was uninhabited.

Israeli media reported that soldiers had imposed a curfew on and moved into the northern West Bank city of Jenin, where the bomber apparently lived. She was identified as Hanadi Jaradat, a lawyer-in-training in her late 20s whose brother and cousin, an Islamic Jihad member, were killed by Israeli forces in June.

Arafat quickly condemned the Haifa attack, calling it a “violation of the national consensus at this delicate moment.” His prime minister-designate, Ahmed Korei, urged Palestinians to “show restraint and halt such operations aimed at civilians because they harm our just and legitimate national struggle.”

Korei is expected to unveil his new government this week and already has come under heavy pressure from Israel and the United States to crack down on militant groups in order to resuscitate the moribund, U.S.-backed peace initiative.

“This despicable attack underscores once again the responsibility of Palestinian authorities to fight terror, which remains the foremost obstacle to achieving the vision of two states living side by side in peace and security,” President Bush said in a statement issued by the White House. “The new Palestinian Cabinet must dedicate itself to dismantling the infrastructure of terror and preventing the kind of murderous actions that we witnessed today.”

The bombing occurred shortly after 2 p.m. beneath gorgeous blue skies that made the beach a natural destination for locals eager to unwind.

The restaurant, a joint venture of Arab and Jewish partners and a fixture on the Haifa shoreline for 38 years, was buzzing with the good humor of several dozen customers, many of them regular patrons on the Jewish Sabbath.

A waiter had just taken Ruth Ginton’s order when the powerful blast shook the place.

“All of a sudden, everything collapsed on us. The ceiling came down, and the windows exploded. We thought it was an earthquake,” said Ginton, 72, a retired headmistress who was lunching with her son and two grandchildren at a window looking out over the sparkling Mediterranean Sea.

“Then it was silent like a graveyard, and I saw bodies of men and women,” she said. “A minute ago, I saw them enjoying themselves eating, and in the [blink] of a moment, they were dead.”

At a nearby table, Alisa Ohayon sat waiting for her bill, hankering for a cigarette and smiling at a cute young girl in pigtails. Seconds later, blood was trickling from Ohayon’s ears.

“I understood it was a suicide bombing immediately,” said Ohayon, 42, who was visiting from Jerusalem. “At first it was like a dream, but I pulled myself together. I was afraid the gas would explode.”

A young mother clutching her child screamed for help. Others, dazed and deafened by the blast, picked their way out, their T-shirts and swimsuits spattered with blood. Paramedics pushed a pregnant woman who appeared to be seriously injured onto a gurney.

One volunteer rescue worker tearfully scooped up a baby’s bloody diaper and a bottle of milk.

“I had three or four kids at my tables,” waiter Salim Khoury, 40, said as he lay on a hospital bed afterward. “I don’t know what happened to them.”

As Khoury, who had been close to the kitchen, moved to get out, he gently nudged the body of a fellow server who lay on the ground. He got no response, he said.

There was confusion over how the bomber managed to push past the security guard posted outside the restaurant’s door. What looked like a jumbled pattern of bullet holes pocked the glassed-in entrance, leading some to suggest that she had shot the guard.

But other witnesses did not report hearing gunfire, and authorities said the marks in the entranceway could have been made by shrapnel.

The attack was the first one here since a suicide bomber boarded a bus and detonated a bomb, killing himself 15 other people seven months ago. Haifa has been a regular target of suicide bombers, perhaps because attackers do not stand out in the street given the city’s Arab population.

In March 2002, a suicide bomber killed 29 people during a ritual Seder meal at the start of the Passover holiday in the seaside resort of Netanya, in the deadliest attack on Israelis since the start of a Palestinian uprising in 2000.

Islamic Jihad’s choice of a woman to carry out the latest attack was unusual but not unprecedented.

Despite a full closure of the West Bank by the Israeli military for the Yom Kippur weekend, Jaradat was able to slip out of Jenin through a gap in the security partition being built by Israel throughout the Palestinian territories.

The breach is likely to fuel Israeli demands that the government speed construction of the costly barrier, a combination of electric fencing, barbed wire and moats that has come under international criticism for cutting deep into the West Bank.

Last week, Sharon’s Cabinet approved an extension of the partition, albeit with gaps, to cover several Jewish settlements in the Palestinian territories.

The mayor of Haifa, Yona Yahav, said he doubted whether the barrier could prevent attacks such as Saturday’s.

“The West Bank is too big ... to close it hermetically,” Yahav said.

Whether the Israeli government will make good on its threat to expel or even kill Arafat is also unclear. The threat to remove the Palestinian leader, issued Sept. 11, was denounced in a resolution passed by the United Nations General Assembly.

Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert brushed off those concerns. “If Israel decides a difficult operation must be carried out, it will have to be performed,” he said. “The world will have to accept our decisions.”

But analysts said that Israel was unlikely to enact such a risky decision without at least tacit consent from Washington.

Arafat’s security detail went on heightened alert at his half-demolished compound in the West Bank, but the situation appeared stable, if tense, late Saturday. Palestinian officials appealed for international help to guarantee Arafat’s safety.

Rather than expel him, Israeli forces may deepen his isolation in his Ramallah compound -- where he has been holed up for nearly two years -- by cutting off his communications with the outside and preventing visits from diplomats.

The Israeli army also is likely to continue with the raids it has been conducting in the West Bank to root out alleged militants. Jenin, in particular, has been subject to extended curfews as Israeli tanks move through the city rounding up suspects.

In one such raid Saturday in the city of Tulkarm, Israeli forces killed a Palestinian man who allegedly organized a shooting attack in which five Israelis died, including a woman and her children. A 9-year-old Palestinian boy also was killed in the raid, hospital officials said.

In the Gaza Strip, a Palestinian toddler was reported to have died Saturday of wounds she had received in an Israeli operation the day before.

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Times staff writer John Hendren in Washington contributed to this report.