THE MIDDLE EAST: Hours after a Palestinian suicide bomber killed 15 Israelis in a snooker hall outside Tel Aviv, another suicide bombing was averted yesterday only because the bomber's device malfunctioned and detonated prematurely, Israeli police said.
A young Palestinian from Jenin crossed into Israel late yesterday morning, apparently intending to board a bus and detonate the explosives he was carrying. But the device went off as he approached a crossroads at Megiddo, in northern Israel.
Mr Yehuda Peretz, a policeman, said he then fired on the man, with the aim of preventing him from detonating any further explosives.
Footage broadcast on Israel television showed the bomber subsequently struggling with a sappers' robot, and apparently holding his hand over the robot's camera arm, which was being used to establish whether he was wearing a suicide bomber's belt under his light top. He was not. The man was later hospitalised in moderate condition. "We were lucky," said the local police commander, Mr Ya'akov Borovsky. "If that device had gone off on a bus, it would have been disastrous."
The failed bombing only confirmed to Israelis that the brief lull in such attacks, which coincided with April's unprecedented military offensive in the West Bank, was truly over. The Hamas leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, is again threatening more attacks such as the one that killed 15 Israelis in the snooker hall at Rishon Letzion on Tuesday night, openly defying a televised, Arabic-language condemnation of terrorism by the Palestinian Authority president, Mr Yasser Arafat.
Nine of the Rishon Letzion victims were laid to rest yesterday, with identification of some of the bodies delayed for hours because of the condition of the corpses, which had been hit by nuts, bolts and metal shards in the bomb.
The attacker, said by Israeli officials to have been dispatched by Hamas from Gaza, used a combination of a suicide bomber's belt, well stocked with explosives, and a device in a case he was carrying - and entered the club, unlicensed, unguarded and on the third-floor of a poorly-constructed building, whose ceiling, walls and roof partially collapsed with the force of the blast.
Among the dead was Ms Anat Trempatrush (36), from nearby Ashdod, whose husband Daniel, himself injured, had to tell their three children from his hospital bed that their mother had been killed. "They didn't believe me," he said tearfully. Also killed were Ms Shoshana Magmari (51), from Tel Aviv, who had gone out for the first time to celebrate a medical report that showed her to have beaten cancer, and a local man Mr Yisrael Shikar (45), a father of three and new grandfather.
Another of the victims was a father of six. Yet another left a wife pregnant with twins. As of last night, 31 of the injured were still in hospital, 12 of them in serious condition.
The grim wreckage in the Sheffield Club - burned snooker tables, smashed slot machines and broken bar stools - lay exposed to the street outside, the side of the building sheared off by the blast.
The local mayor, Mr Meir Nitzan, said the owner had been raided frequently for illegally operating the slots and other gambling facilities; many of the injured, habitués of the club, said they had complained many times about the absence of a guard, and speculated that the bomber or those who dispatched him may have been familiar with the club, its substantial clientele and lack of security.
The entire building, partly constructed with the same inferior materials that caused a wedding hall collapse in Jerusalem last year, would now probably be razed, said Mr Nitzan.
Among the visitors to the bomb scene yesterday was the European Union's local envoy, Mr Miguel Moratinos, who was clearly determined to resist oft-heard Israeli assertions that the EU, like the UN, takes a one-sided view of the conflict - castigating Israel for its West Bank incursions and the fatalities they cause, while ignoring Israeli victims.
Aware that the blast had occurred shortly before the UN Security Council voted to condemn Israel over "the attacks committed by the Israeli occupying forces against the Palestinian people in several Palestinian cities, particularly in the Jenin refugee camp", in a resolution that made no mention of Palestinian suicide bombings, Mr Moratinos declared that the EU had always opposed terrorism: "There is no good or bad terror," he said. "There is only one terror and we have to struggle against it."