MIDDLE EAST: Two Israelis were killed - an 18-month-old baby and an older woman - and several more, including a toddler, were in a critical condition last night, after a suicide-bomber detonated explosives outside a café near Tel Aviv.
The bombing came as Israeli troops re-invaded the West Bank city of Bethlehem, in the latest of a series of army incursions designed to thwart such attacks.
Mr Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, the Israeli Defence Minister, said earlier yesterday that bombing attempts were running at one or more a day. "Thank God, we're thwarting 90 per cent of them," he had said.
In the Gaza Strip, Palestinian sources said a 17-year-old Palestinian died after being hit by an Israeli tank shell. There was no immediate Israeli comment. In north Jerusalem, a gardener found a bomb near the entrance to a block of flats.
The device was safely defused by Israeli police.
Witnesses to last night's blast said the bomber had tried to enter one of the stores at a shopping centre in Petah Tikvah, north-east of Tel Aviv, but was deterred by the security guards. So he detonated his device close to crowded tables outside a cafe. The blue-and-white striped baby-carriage stood out among the wrecked tables and chairs at the bomb site; as a policewoman gently began to move it away, the hood section broke off.
The Al-Aksa Brigades, affiliated to President Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction of the PLO, claimed responsibility for the blast. And aides to Israel's Prime Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon, directly blamed Mr Arafat for "failing to lift a finger" to stop the bombers.
Mr Sharon is said to have branded Mr Arafat "a pathological liar" when told by the visiting Canadian Foreign Minister, Mr Bill Graham, that the Palestinian leader claimed to have recently arrested three would-be suicide bombers. The Palestinian Authority issued a statement condemning last night's attack, and Mr Arafat has spoken out against the bombings recently, saying they run counter to the Palestinian national interest.
His West Bank security chief, Mr Jibril Rajoub, said on Sunday that attacks inside sovereign Israel were "a strategic mistake".
But while Mr Arafat and Mr Rajoub say that last month's Israeli offensive in the West Bank destroyed their security apparatuses, leaving them incapable of thwarting the attacks, Mr Sharon vehemently rejects this, insisting that Mr Arafat has no desire to prevent them and has been inciting and funding them.
Declaring that it no longer places any faith in the Palestinian Authority as a body that will counter such attacks, Israel yesterday launched further incursions into Palestinian territory, sending troops deep into Bethlehem, as well as to the outskirts of Ramallah.
In Bethlehem's Dehaishe refugee camp, the army said it had arrested Ahmed Mughrabi and two other men it alleged planned a suicide bombing last week in which two Israelis were killed. Mr Mughrabi is the local leader of the Al-Aqsa Brigades.
Among the first places where soldiers were deployed was around the Church of the Nativity, scene of a 39-day siege that ended earlier this month with 13 Palestinians, who had been hiding there, being deported to Ireland and other EU countries. This time, army sources said, they were intent on preventing "wanted Palestinians" from gaining access to the church.
Speaking before last night's blast, Mr Ben-Eliezer said he did not envisage an imminent military offensive on the scale of April's "Operation Defensive Shield," which had, he said, been launched because the situation had "become intolerable." The defence minister also angrily criticised a new campaign by settler leaders aimed at attracting 1,000 new families to a cluster of West Bank settlements. Such a campaign could "cost us dearly", he said.