Israelis Search Hotel Rubble for Survivors

Israeli rescue workers with sniffer dogs dug frantically Friday through the shifting chaos of concrete-slab debris at the site of what had been a luxury beachfront hotel, searching for survivors of a bombing that killed at least three dozen people and injured scores.

The fiery attack late Thursday on an Egyptian enclave catering to Israeli tourists -- carried out with what investigators believed was an explosives-laden vehicle and possibly a backup suicide attacker on foot -- was a rare strike against Israelis not carried out in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip or Israel proper.

The devastating attack on the Taba Hilton, in a normally tranquil, sun-kissed tourist zone just across the border from Israel, occurred at the close of a weeklong Jewish holiday, when many Israeli families had traveled to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula on vacation despite the Israeli government’s warning of a possible terrorist attack.

Two smaller Egyptian resorts on the Red Sea also were attacked, said investigators and witnesses, who described explosions that tore through small communities of beach huts frequented by backpackers and campers. Those attacks reportedly killed and maimed young Israeli tourists and Bedouin residents.

Although cross-border investigations had just been launched, many Israeli officials said the tightly synchronized attacks, a series of blasts over less than two hours, bore the fingerprints of the Al Qaeda terrorist network or a like-minded organization. Zeev Boim, Israel’s deputy defense minister, told Israel Radio on Friday that he believed a branch of Al Qaeda was responsible.

Egyptian sources also said their working assumption was that Al Qaeda or a similar group had carried out the attacks, and officials in Europe and Washington agreed.

“I think it’s likely this attack shows the continuing effort by the jihadi organizations linked to Al Qaeda to adopt the Palestinian cause,” a high-ranking French security official said. “With these attacks, the Al Qaeda networks try to win favor with Palestinians on the street and Muslims everywhere who are drawn to the Palestinian cause.”

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said that he and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak had teamed up to fight terrorism. But many Israeli officials grumbled that Egyptian bureaucratic foot-dragging had prevented crack Israeli rescue teams -- accustomed to swarming over a domestic disaster site almost instantaneously -- from swiftly entering Egypt to render aid to victims.

Israeli analysts reiterated their belief that it was unlikely that the attack had been staged by a group connected to Palestinian militants battling Israeli troops in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Groups such as Hamas do not as a rule operate in Egypt, said Yossi Melman, a prominent Israeli commentator on intelligence matters.

“Although there is uncertainty as to the perpetrators, intelligence experts believe that the [attack’s] characteristics point to ‘global jihad,’ ” Melman wrote in Friday’s edition of the newspaper Haaretz. “The targeting of a tourist site characterizes many such attacks since Sept. 11.”

Israeli officials also dismissed the notion that the attack was a response to the wide-ranging, 9-day-old Israeli offensive in northern Gaza that has left nearly 90 Palestinians dead, including four in a missile attack Friday.

The Gaza offensive was meant to choke off militants’ targeting of nearby Israeli towns with homemade Kassam rockets. Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom and others said the Sinai attack had clearly been planned over many months.

The Israeli military said that the coordinated resort bombings Thursday night killed at least 36 people, nearly all Israelis, and wounded 125. That toll was expected to rise, however, as more bodies were recovered from the rubble of the Taba hotel and remote areas where the secondary attacks occurred.

The attacks were terrifying shocks to young Israelis vacationing at the ramshackle beach encampment south of Taba known as Ras Shaitan, or Satan’s Head, who had never suspected that bombs would strike such a remote area.

“I was so scared -- there was such a strong feeling of helplessness,” said Anat Zarafati, a tattooed Jerusalem resident of 25 who was vacationing with friends. “We didn’t know what was going on.”

An official with Israel’s Home Front Command, which responds to domestic disasters, said many victims were believed to be trapped in a wing of the 10-story Hilton that pancaked in the explosion.

One Israeli woman was pulled alive from the rubble of the hotel Friday, said Gideon Bar-On, a reserve brigadier general who heads the army’s search-and-rescue team.

Under a scorching sun, scores of Israeli soldiers used sledgehammers to break up fallen concrete to look for buried victims. Sixty-foot slabs of concrete siding leaned crumpled at the base of the building. Nearby was a row of charred cars that had been parked near the front of the lobby, where the bomber apparently struck.

Lengths of bedsheets apparently used by guests trying to escape the fire that broke out after the bombing hung from a balcony above the hotel lobby. Debris was scattered all around: broken chairs, the shell of a television set, chunks of glass, a woman’s purse. Some debris ended up in the hotel’s two swimming pools, 100 feet from the entrance.

There were reminders of the festivities that preceded the explosion. In a first-floor bar, most of the tables were still in place, with half-finished beers and soft drinks atop them. At the patio restaurant, a plate heaped with spaghetti lay on a table, undisturbed.

After the attacks, Sharon convened an emergency session of his Cabinet in Jerusalem, and ministers expressed concern and anger that more Israelis had not obeyed warnings to avoid the Sinai over several weeks of Jewish holidays that began in mid-September.

“The warning was highly specific,” a frustrated security official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Conservative Cabinet minister Zevulun Orlev asked why the border with Egypt had not been closed before the holidays, and the head of the Shin Bet security agency, Avi Dichter, replied that such a move was not possible under the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty of 1979.

In closed-door talks with his ministers, Sharon vowed to fight extremist attacks “with every means possible and without restraint,” according to Israeli media reports.

“There will be no compromising with terror,” the prime minister was quoted as saying.

Israelis were returning home in droves. About 15,000 citizens were thought to have been in the Sinai Peninsula at the time of the attacks, and thousands flooded back across the border, Israeli officials said.

Palestinians worried that they would be held accountable for the carnage. Jibril Rajoub, security advisor to Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, told satellite TV channel Al Jazeera that no Palestinian faction was responsible for the Sinai bombings.

The Israeli government emphasized that it considered Egypt as much a victim of the attacks as the Israelis in Egypt’s Red Sea resorts. The Cabinet said in a statement that such attacks were based on “hatred for the free world, for democratic values.”

Israel and Egypt appeared to be cooperating in the investigation of the attacks. In recent months, the two nations have also been holding intensive consultations over how to create a secure environment in the Gaza Strip if Israel carries out a plan to withdraw troops and settlers by the end of next year.

Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz appointed a general as liaison with Egypt in the bomb probe, and Israeli media reported that the hard-line head of the secretive Mossad intelligence service, Meir Dagan, was pleased with the coordination between the governments.

Although it has been nearly two decades since Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt under the terms of a peace treaty, many Israelis -- particularly those in their 40s, who enjoyed carefree times in desert destinations such as Taba in their youth -- regard the Sinai as a setting close to home, almost as Israeli as a part of the Arab world.

“Today’s Sinai is very different from yesterday’s Sinai, and the price is very high indeed,” commentator Ravit Naor wrote in the Maariv newspaper.

Israeli sources said investigators were studying the possibility that the assailants may have brought the vehicles used in the bombings from Israel rather than from within Egypt.

Although Palestinian groups are considered only remote suspects, Israeli experts were carefully examining possible links to the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.

However, the former head of the Israeli army’s southern command, which covers the Gaza Strip and the Negev desert, told the newspaper Yediot Aharonot that militant groups with differing agendas could be sharing information and logistical support based on shared access to the Sinai Peninsula.

“There are telltale signs of cooperation between three elements: Islamic Jihad in Egypt, Al Qaeda and Hamas in Gaza,” reservist Brig. Gen. Tsivka Fogel said.

Ellingwood reported from Taba and King from Jerusalem. Times staff writers Sebastian Rotella in Paris and Mark Mazzetti in Washington contributed to this report.