Blast Destroys Israeli-Filled Hotel in Egypt

An enormous explosion ripped through a resort hotel Thursday night in an Egyptian border enclave that caters to Israeli tourists, killing at least 19 people and injuring more than 100 in what Israeli security sources said appeared to be a terrorist attack.

More than three dozen people were missing, the Israeli military said today.

The blast at the five-star hotel complex in Taba, which was followed by explosions in two other Egyptian tourist towns on the Red Sea, came weeks after Israeli intelligence officials had warned of a strong possibility of attacks on Israelis vacationing in the Sinai Peninsula for the Jewish holidays.

Israeli and Egyptian officials initially said at least 30 people were killed in the explosion. Israeli military officials said this morning that at least 19 people were killed, some of whom were not Israelis. Hospital officials said about a dozen children were among those injured.

The fiery blast in Taba -- which peeled away the concrete facade of the Taba Hilton, pancaked some of its lower floors and set the main building ablaze -- appeared to have been caused by a truck bomb, said Israeli security officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility by groups known to have committed previous attacks.

Israel is under constant threat from Palestinian militant groups such as Hamas, which operate mainly in Israel and the Palestinian territories. The group has threatened revenge for Israel’s assassination of its leaders.

However, some analysts and officials suggested that an attack of this type, scale and degree of synchronization more closely resembled the methodology of Al Qaeda, which is believed to have been behind the bombing two years ago of a hotel in Mombasa, Kenya, that had a mainly Israeli clientele.

The attack on the fully booked Taba hotel came as Israelis were observing the last in a string of holidays including the harvest festival of Sukkot. At this time of year, Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula is a popular Israeli tourist destination, although visits there had fallen off sharply earlier in the 4-year-old current conflict with the Palestinians.

About two hours after the 10 p.m. blast, witnesses reported two explosions in the nearby towns of Ras al Sultan and Nuweiba. Both also draw Israeli visitors, though they cater more to campers and backpackers. Israel’s Channel Two television cited Egyptian authorities as reporting at least several deaths and dozens of injuries in those blasts, but details were sketchy.

After initial delays in being allowed into Egypt, Israeli rescuers rushed the wounded Israelis -- who constituted most of the casualties, medical officials at the scene said -- by ambulance and helicopter to hospitals in the southern Israeli communities of Beersheba and Eilat.

“The whole front of the hotel has collapsed,” guest Yigal Vakni told Israel’s Army Radio. “There are dozens of people on the floor, lots of blood.... The whole thing is burning and they have nothing to put it out with.”

Vakni said most of the guests at the hotel, a lavish beachfront complex with views of the mountains of the Sinai, were Israeli.

He and other witnesses described pandemonium inside the hotel casino when the explosion punched out a wall and the ceiling collapsed. Guests on the upper floors fled by emergency exits, while others, trapped, cried out from the rubble.

“It was as if the gates of hell had opened,” an Israeli doctor who was staying at the hotel told Israel’s Channel One television.

The rolling echo of the blast reverberated across the desert, shaking resorts as far as a mile away and causing guests to run outside in panic.

Channel Two reported several hours later that Egyptian police had arrested an unspecified number of suspects.

Israeli authorities, speaking on condition of anonymity, said they had no independent confirmation, and said it would not be out of character for Egyptian police in such circumstances to carry out a mass roundup based on scant evidence.

Egypt, which has a tradition of cracking down on home-grown Islamic militant movements, said it was declaring the Sinai Peninsula a closed military zone.

Four weeks ago, in the days leading up to the Jewish new year holiday of Rosh Hashana, Israeli counter-terrorism officials urged the country’s citizens not to visit the Sinai, saying there were specific and credible signs of a potential attack.

“A concrete possibility has emerged ... that terrorists will try to attack tourist centers in Egypt, especially in the Sinai,” the Foreign Ministry said in an unusually sharply worded travel advisory.

Thousands nonetheless flocked across the border to the Sinai, which Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East War but returned to Egypt after a 1979 peace treaty. Tour operators said the area had been packed with Israelis for three weeks.

An Israeli man identified only as Ilan, who spoke to Israeli radio, described people escaping the burning hotel and running toward the Red Sea beachfront in the darkness.

“There was complete panic, hysteria,” he said in a voice ragged with tension. “People are smashing glass panes to get out, barefoot people are walking on broken glass -- you could hear people shouting out names, looking for others.”

Witnesses said the explosion exposed rooms -- some with their furniture intact -- for nearly the hotel’s entire 10-story height.

In the initial chaos, guests said, Egyptian rescuers were slow to reach the site. “People were calling out for a doctor, but there wasn’t one,” said Ilan, the radio interviewee.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon immediately contacted Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to appeal for the speedy movement of emergency personnel across the border, and Mubarak quickly stepped in to help, Israeli media reports said.

About 50 Israeli firefighters were sent to help douse the fire, which covered the beachfront with a haze of smoke.

The blasts triggered a high state of alert in Israel. Air force planes were scrambled and soldiers based in the southern part of the country were called back early from holiday leave. An ambulance and rescue service appealed for blood donations.

When Israeli citizens find themselves in danger away from home, the government goes to great lengths to bring them back safely. Between 12,000 and 15,000 Israelis were believed to be vacationing in the Sinai, and the Israeli Foreign Ministry scrambled to assist with a mass exodus from Egypt, sending dozens of buses across the border.

The Taba crossing is Israel’s busiest with Egypt. Israelis are allowed to travel to the resort on a limited, easy-to-obtain entry permit that allows access only to the tourist enclave, with its casino and scuba-diving sites.

Once a hamlet with only a nomadic Bedouin population, Taba was developed as a resort while the Sinai was in Israeli hands. It was the last sliver of territory to be returned to Egypt, and that occurred only after international mediation resolved a border dispute.

Israelis with friends and relatives vacationing in the Sinai jammed cellphone networks and flooded hospital hotlines late into the night. They took turns watching TV to look for loved ones in the jumbled video sequences of the wounded being loaded onto stretchers and into ambulances for the short journey into Israel.

The Sinai assault is the most serious apparently targeting Israelis abroad since the November 2002 Mombasa attack, in which three suicide bombers struck a hotel popular with Israelis, killing 13 other people. In an apparently synchronized action, assailants fired missiles at an Israeli charter plane with 271 people aboard as it was taking off from Mombasa, but they missed their target.

Israeli commentators were already comparing the Sinai events to the 1997 massacre of foreign tourists in Luxor, from which Egypt’s tourist industry took years to recover.

“If this is indeed terror, it is a grave blow to Egypt -- in terms of tourism, its relations with Israel and its own domestic politics,” said Oded Granot, the main commentator on security affairs for Channel One.

A U.S. State Department official said that “we have seen the reports and deeply regret the loss of life.” He said the department was not aware of any claims of responsibility for the attacks and would not speculate on the perpetrators.

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Times staff writer Laura King reported from Jerusalem and special correspondent Zer from Eilat. Staff writer Sonni Efron in Washington contributed to this report.