At least ten Israelis were killed and more than 40 others were injured when a Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up in the ultra-Orthodox Beit Yisrael neighborhood of Jerusalem on Saturday evening.
The Qatari Al Jezeera television station identified the bomber as 19-year-old Mohammed Ahmed Dararmeh, from the Deheisheh refugee camp near the West Bank city of Bethlehem.
Of the 40 people taken to hospital, two - one of them a 7-year-old boy - were in very serious condition, three were seriously wounded, two moderately and the rest lightly.
Jerusalem police chief Mickey Levy said that there had been no warnings of an attack in the Beit Yisrael neighborhood. He said that the suicide bomber had apparently blown himself up in a group of civilians.
"There are a number of people who have been killed and there are wounded who have been evacuated to hospital," Levy told Army Radio. "There is a lot of damage," he added.
The area has been the site of a number of Palestinian attacks in the past year. A car bomb detonated in a nearby neighborhood in February 2001, wounding five Israelis. An explosive device was found in a car in the neighborhood in March 2001, but was neutralized by Israeli security forces.
The Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a military wing of Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, claimed responsibility for this suicide attack.
An unidentified caller from the group told Reuters that the bomber came from the Deheisheh refugee camp. He added a videotape of the bomber would be released later.
"This attack is in response to the massacres that the [Israeli army] carried out in Balata and in Jenin [refugee camps]," the caller said.
The United States condemned the bombing in Jerusalem, calling on Arafat to stop those responsible for such attacks.
"The United States condemns in the strongest possible terms this terrorist outrage," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said.
"Such murder of innocent citizens cannot be justified and can only harm the interests and aspirations of the Palestinian people in progress toward a better future," Boucher added.
"We call upon Chairman Arafat and the Palestinian Authority to do everything possible to confront and stop the terrorists responsible for these criminal acts."
For its part, the PA released a statement condemning this attack, stressing that it was against any attacks on civilians, Israeli or Palestinian.
Meanwhile, according to Haaretz, the body of 40-year-old Chief Inspector Moshe Dayan, who had been shot dead, was found Saturday night near the West Bank settlement of Keidar.
The body of Dayan, who had been shot in the head, was discovered when one of the settlement's security officers received a report from two Bedouins who had found him in the area.
According to the initial investigation, the officer had been travelling in the area alone.
A Bethlehem-based group, calling itself "The People of Atef Abayat," which has links to Palestinian Fatah movement, took responsibility for the killing.(Albawaba.com)
© 2002 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
