ISRAEL: Israeli troops had searched in vain for him in a sweep through Tulkarm but Abdel-Basset Odeh was still free, writes David Horovitz in Jerusalem.
Abdel-Basset Odeh was a bomber Israel saw coming but couldn't thwart.
The man who walked into the crowded dining hall at Netanya's Park Hotel on Wednesday night, and detonated a huge explosive device loaded with ball-bearings and metal shards for maximal devastation, had been high on its wanted lists for years.
There was no doubt that Odeh was primed to join the growing ranks of the "martyrs". Last August, Israeli troops intercepted a fellow Hamas activist, named yesterday by military officials as Nihad Abu Kishak who, under questioning, admitted that the explosives he was carrying were intended for Odeh, the suicide-bomber-in-waiting.
Israel officially asked PresidentYasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority to arrest Odeh, and he was jailed. Briefly.
The security guard, on his first day on duty at the Park Hotel, says he saw nothing untoward as he guarded the door on Wednesday night, but that he also made occasional patrols around the hotel.
A lobby clerk says he saw Odeh enter the building soon after 7 p.m., and called out to him to stop because he looked suspicious.
Not so, said a Swedish guest at the hotel, one of the 230 who had gathered for a festive Passover meal. The bomber, according to this eyewitness, was disguised as a woman, wearing a long wig, and attracted no suspicion as he walked slowly and deliberately between the tables to the very centre of the room before detonating his charge.
The ceiling fell in. The lights went out. Windows shattered on the floors above. Water pipes burst.
As he ran toward the exit, Yitzhak, a 70-year-old Israeli man, said he saw a wounded woman and called out to offer help. "How can you help?" she responded. "I don't have any legs." The pool of blood and water was still in the centre of the room yesterday morning.
So were the remnants of uneaten meals, a yarmulke stained with blood, a baby-stroller. Twenty-one people were dead - some of their bodies so utterly devastated that, last night, 24 hours later, they had yet to be identified by relatives.
More than 60 of the wounded were still in hospital last night, 20 of them in serious condition.
Odeh's family were seated on the floor of their home in Tulkarm, a short drive and a world away, passing around an enlarged photograph of their son. And Israel was blaming Yasser Arafat.
Outside the hotel yesterday, Netanya residents gathered to stare, mourn and scream amid the debris. "The people of Israel lives," rang one defiant chant. "Kill the Arabs," demanded another. Ms Paulette Cohen, the hotel's elderly owner, was surveying the scene of the carnage, walking around with a machine-gun slung over her shoulder, and vowing that: "Of course we'll rebuild. We can't capitulate".
"Where's Shimon Peres?" asked one man in the street, intimating that were the foreign minister, the architect of the Oslo peace process, to be so foolish as to show his face, the reception would be bitter. In fact, Mr Peres had spent the day telephoning international leaders, urging them to pressure Mr Arafat into issuing a ceasefire demand to his loyalists, and into using his security personnel to thwart further bombings.
Mr Arafat has condemned the bombing. His West Bank security chief, Mr Jibril Rajoub, widely regarded as a Palestinian moderate, accompanied his condemnation with the assertion that Israel was "breeding terrorism" by maintaining military blockades of Palestinian cities, targeting PA installations, and assassinating key intifada militants.
Israeli officials countered that the blockades were in place to try and thwart attacks, and that the "targeted killings" of militants would halt if the PA arrested them. Last night, as tanks and troops headed toward Palestinian-controlled areas of the West Bank, the officials said the coming military operation would be focused on "dismantling the terrorist infrastructure". But they said much the same when mounting a large-scale incursion into the same areas earlier this month.
When the troops pulled out two weeks later, Israel was being heavily criticised internationally for killing 150 Palestinians, many of them in gunbattles, and for detaining hundreds of civilians. And it had arrested very few of the men on its wanted lists.
The troops had searched for him in Tulkarm but Abdel-Basset Odeh, for one, was still free.