THE MIDDLE EAST: David Horovitz reports from Jerusalem on a weekend of violence in the 17-month conflict between Israel and Palestinians
A horrific series of attacks by a Palestinian suicide bomber and several gunmen left 21 Israelis dead this weekend, amid the bloodiest upsurge of this 17-month intifada conflict.
Unprecedented Israeli military action inside refugee camps and raids on other West Bank targets over the past few days had seen some 30 Palestinians and two Israeli soldiers killed.
The Israeli cabinet was meeting in emergency session late last night, with some ministers calling for an all-out assault on Mr Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority, and others urging a new effort to negotiate a ceasefire. The authority issued a statement condemning a Saturday night suicide bombing in an ultra-Orthodox Jerusalem neighbourhood in which nine Israelis were killed, six of them children.
It did not, however, comment on the killing of 10 Israelis - seven soldiers and three civilians - at a military roadblock in the West Bank yesterday morning.
The attack was carried out by Palestinian snipers, who used non-automatic weapons and escaped unharmed. A Palestinian gunman also killed a soldier after crossing the border from Gaza yesterday morning, and another Israel, an off-duty policeman, was shot dead as he rode his motorbike through West Bank sand dunes on Saturday.
Groups affiliated with Mr Arafat's Fatah faction of the PLO claimed responsibility for both the major attacks, and a leading Fatah official, Mr Marwan Barghouti, praised the killings of soldiers and settlers as heroic "blows to the army of occupation".
Although Saudi Arabia and European leaders are floating diplomatic initiatives aimed at ending the confrontation, there are currently no meaningful contacts between Israeli and Palestinian leaders, and the United States is still determinedly resisting direct intervention. The Bush administration merely issued a statement condemning the Jerusalem suicide bombing, and urging Mr Arafat to "do everything possible to confront and stop the terrorists responsible".
The Pope also called on the warring sides to "silence the guns and listen to the voice of reason". In an immediate response to the Jerusalem suicide bombing and the snipers' killings at the roadblock south of Ramallah, Israeli F-16s and tanks yesterday fired on Palestinian police installations in and around that West Bank city.
Four policemen were killed at three separate locations. Earlier yesterday, Israeli helicopters fired on a police station and what officials said was a weapons factory in Bethlehem.
Yesterday morning, the army had withdrawn from the Balata, one of two West Bank refugee camps it entered late last week - the first such raids by the army in the course of the intifada - in what an Israeli paratroop commander said was an effort to "demonstrate to the terrorists that there is nowhere for them to hide". The troops had pulled out of the other camp, in Jenin, on Saturday. Israeli and Palestinian officials said that some 30 Palestinians were killed during the incursion into the camps - most of them in gun battles with Israeli soldiers, two of whom were killed.
Military officials claimed that the incursions had served their purpose, and that explosives and rockets were seized, preventing future attacks.
However, Israeli military commentators termed the raids a pointless "fireworks display" designed to "satisfy Israeli public opinion". Israel's Prime Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon, insisted there was no connection between the raids and the weekend's attacks on Israeli targets.
However, Saturday's suicide bomber, 19-year-old Mohammad Daragma, a resident of Bethlehem's Dehaishe camp, said in the trademark farewell video that he was avenging "my families" in the two camps.
When news broke of the suicide bombing, 1,500 Palestinians held a celebratory parade through Dehaishe, and there were similar celebrations in Ramallah.
In Gaza yesterday, Hamas organised a procession of white-clad would-be suicide-bombers carrying fake explosives around their waists.
Daragma's bombing was chilling even by the vicious standards of the suicide bombers. Making his way to the entrance of a hall where crowds of ultra-Orthodox Jews were leaving a bar-mitzvah celebration, he detonated his explosives alongside a cluster of parents, children and babies.
As a consequence, the fatalities included five members of the Nehmad family - mother, father, their two children and a young cousin - another mother and her baby daughter, and a 12-year-old boy and his year-old sister.
Mr Moshe Nimni, a volunteer rescue worker, said he saw "babies whose heads had been torn off." Ms Aviva Nahmani, the mother of the bar-mitzvah celebrant, spoke of "a car on fire, bodies on the ground, and little babies so burnt you couldn't see the bodies properly."
She said she begged for "forgiveness from all the families" who had lost their loved ones.