Troops’ Bodies Arrive as Israel Mourns Bomb Toll

Israelis paid tearful tribute Thursday to three fallen soldiers whose bodies were repatriated in a prisoner exchange with the militant group Hezbollah, a somber homecoming that occurred only hours after a suicide blast ripped through a Jerusalem bus, killing 10 passengers and maiming scores.

The return of the soldiers’ remains -- along with the release of Israeli businessman Elhanan Tannenbaum, who had been held by Hezbollah for more than three years -- provided a touch of national consolation on a grief-shrouded day. There is enormous public sympathy for the families of the troops, who had been missing since participating in a firefight along the Lebanese border in October 2000.

The German-mediated prisoner swap was already in progress when an explosion tore the bus apart as it passed through the sedate, affluent Jerusalem neighborhood of Rehavia just before 9 a.m. Investigators said the bomb was particularly large and studded with metal nails, screws and spikes that turned to deadly shrapnel.

Even in a country that has become accustomed to such scenes of carnage, the aftermath had the power to shock: body parts strewn along the tree-lined street and dazed survivors being helped from the wreckage.

At a ceremony in a chilly, flag-draped hangar at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion International Airport to mark the arrival of the soldiers’ remains, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, clad in a black suit and skullcap, spoke of the “cruel terror” of the bombing.

“Our reality sometimes forces upon us a terrible mix of one sadness with another and at times sadness with joy,” he said as some in the audience of dignitaries, soldiers and relatives wiped away tears.

Securing the return of the soldiers’ remains, Sharon said, represented “a promise kept, a moral obligation honored in full.”

Across the border in Lebanon, celebratory gunfire erupted at the homecoming of nearly two dozen returning Hezbollah prisoners, led by two militia chieftains who had spent years in Israeli prisons. In the southern slums of Beirut, a Hezbollah stronghold, supporters choked the streets.

There was rejoicing, too, in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as 400 freed Palestinian prisoners were reunited with their families. Women howled and children passed out honey-soaked pastries.

Palestinians complained, however, that most of those freed were serving the last months or years of relatively short sentences.

The logistically complicated exchange -- whose venues included the Cologne-Bonn airport in Germany, a little-used border crossing into Lebanon, several West Bank hamlets and the main entry to the Gaza Strip -- began before dawn and ended well after dark with the arrival of a military plane carrying Tannenbaum and the remains.

The terms of the deal deeply divided Israel, with some commentators insisting they would encourage Hezbollah to carry out more kidnappings. In Beirut on Thursday, Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah warned of further abductions as a last resort if Israel did not release its last Lebanese prisoner, according to news agency reports.

Others feared the precedent set by the exchange could require Israel to pay a high price for concrete information about missing airman Ron Arad, whose plane was downed over Lebanon 18 years ago. Arad’s unresolved case is seen as exemplifying Israel’s commitment to bringing home its prisoners of war and battlefield dead.

For many Israelis, the timing of the exchange -- on the day of a bloody terrorist attack -- intensified their bitterness over making such a lopsided bargain with Shiite Muslim militants. Sharon, however, defended the nature of the exchange, saying it showed the value Israel placed on the sanctity of life.

The bus bombing quickly took on a political dimension, with Israeli officials saying it showed that a separation barrier they are building in the West Bank -- which Israel will be called on to defend next month before the International Court of Justice in The Hague -- is a necessary bulwark against such attacks.

“Once again, the lives of Jerusalemites were shattered when they were blown up on their way to work, on their way to school, on their way to shopping,” said Foreign Ministry spokesman Jonathan Peled, who went to the bombing scene. “This proves once again why we urgently need and have full justification to build the security fence.”

Shortly after the bombing, the Foreign Ministry posted unusually graphic images from the scene on its website, showing a woman’s body face down in the street, a severed arm, leg and foot, and scattered personal effects -- a cellphone, a skullcap, a bloodstained datebook.

Palestinians argue that the barrier’s route appropriates huge swaths of the West Bank, has cut tens of thousands of Palestinians off from their jobs and farms, and prejudices the outcome of any talks on the boundaries of their future state.

Fueling tensions between the two sides, a Palestinian militia affiliated with Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction, the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, claimed responsibility for the bombing. The attacker was identified as a Palestinian Authority policeman from a village near Bethlehem, in the West Bank.

Disclosure of these links to Arafat’s administration drew angry calls by some prominent Israeli politicians for the Palestinian leader’s expulsion, a measure that in the past Israel has threatened to carry out at the time of its choosing. Sharon was meeting late Thursday with senior security officials to weigh a potential military response to the bombing.

In a letter left behind and distributed to Palestinian news organizations, the bomber, Ali Munir Jaara, described the attack as revenge for an Israeli military incursion into Gaza City a day earlier that left eight Palestinians dead, at least four of them gunmen from militant groups.

“This is the first in chains of future suicide attacks,” Jaara wrote. “The coming ones will be more lethal.”

In front of the Jaara family’s house in the Aida refugee camp on Bethlehem’s outskirts, Koranic verses played over loudspeakers as a stream of relatives and friends arrived to offer condolences or congratulations.

The thunderous explosion, which occurred only yards from Sharon’s official residence -- the prime minister was at his ranch in the Negev desert at the time -- prompted Israel to cancel a meeting with Palestinian officials on ways to improve living conditions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

“Dialogue is always better than no dialogue,” Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom told reporters. “But today is not the appropriate day.”

Israeli officials also said that on a day marked by so much bloodshed, they would not respond immediately to Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Korei’s offer to hold direct talks with Sharon. Although Korei was appointed to his post four months ago, the two leaders have yet to meet.

Only an attack of such magnitude could have diverted Israelis’ attention from the prisoner swap, which had transfixed the country since the weekend, when the terms of the agreement were announced. As often happens in this small, close-knit country, a highly public event took on the aura of intimate family grief.

Israeli television stations carried live coverage of the bombing’s aftermath but broke away to report each stage of the prisoner exchange.

The three soldiers -- Sgt. Adi Avitan, Sgt. Benjamin Avraham and Sgt. Maj. Omar Souad -- had been declared dead by the army based on intelligence. But until the end, their families clung to the hope that they might still be alive.

As evidence of the slain soldiers’ identities emerged through DNA tests conducted in Germany, leaders and ordinary Israelis alike voiced solidarity with the families. Top army generals visited their homes, and Sharon telephoned.

For outsiders, the degree of popular identification with the families may be difficult to grasp, but the universality of military service in Israel helps to account for it. Almost every Israeli Jew has a relative who is or has been in the army or the military reserves, and most could vividly imagine the families’ ordeal.

“At least we will have a grave and a tombstone to visit,” the newspaper Maariv quoted the Avitan family as saying in a statement. “We can go to him, sit by his side and tell him what happened in the years that passed since he was not with us.”

The homecoming for Tannenbaum, the Israeli businessman, was much more subdued. He had a private reunion with his family, but authorities want to question him about his business dealings at the time of his abduction. Media reports have said he is suspected of having been engaged in illegal drug deals.

He was also a colonel in the military reserves, and Israeli intelligence agencies were concerned about sensitive information he could have provided, under duress, to Hezbollah.

Many Israelis were surprised by footage of Tannenbaum, 58, aired late Wednesday by Al Manar, the Hezbollah-affiliated television station. Israeli news reports had cited intelligence describing his health as gravely compromised, but in the broadcast he appeared healthy.

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Times staff writers Ken Ellingwood in Jerusalem and Jeffrey Fleishman in Berlin and special correspondent Samir Zedan in Bethlehem contributed to this report.