A car bomb exploded Monday at a railway station at Binyamina in northern Israel, killing at least one person and injuring several others, said reports.
The blast, which Israel blamed on a suicide bomber, occurred as a crowd of travelers was waiting for a train at the station between Kadera and Haifa.
Israel Radio reported that a woman was killed and five other people were injured.
Three of the injured were in serious condition and were evacuated to the Hillel Yaffeh Medical Center in Hadera, said the radio, cited by Haaretz newspaper.
The paper said that police were hunting for a car suspected of having transported the bomber to the scene of the attack.
Senior sources in Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s office said the attack was expected and was in line with all the warnings provided by the various security sources in recent days, according to the radio.
Israeli Communications Minister Reuven Rivlin blamed Palestinian Presient Yasser Arafat for the blast.
He told Israel television, "Arafat is sitting somewhere and smiling ... saying that you can talk with me but I am hitting you at the same time," referring to talks Arafat held Sunday in Cairo with Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres.
It was not immediately clear how Sharon would react to the attack, said Haaretz, but it said that at a recent cabinet meeting it was decided that the army would retaliate after every attack.
Since the September 2000 eruption of the latest Palestinian uprising against 34 years of Israeli military occupation, the media has reported that Palestinians have killed over 124 Israelis with weapons ranging from stones and knives to machineguns and car bombs. Israeli military sources have reported well over 600 injuries to Israelis of Jewish descent.
In the same time period, according to the UK newspaper The Guardian, Israeli soldiers and armed Jewish settlers have killed 13 Arab Israelis and 510 Palestinians with weapons ranging from machineguns and tanks to US-made Apache helicopter gunships and F-16s.
According to an Amnesty International, nearly 100 of the Palestinians killed were children. In addition, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society has reported over 14,000 Palestinians wounded.
Jewish author Noam Chomsky, who according to a New York Times Book Review article is “arguably the most important intellectual alive,” has been quoted as saying: “State terrorism is an extreme form of terrorism, generally much worse than individual terrorism because it has the resources of a state behind it.” – Albawaba.com
