ISRAEL: Two suicide bombings an hour apart killed two Israelis yesterday and cast the heaviest doubts to date on the crumbling six-week-old intifada ceasefire, writes David Horovitz in Jerusalem.
In the first blast, at a supermarket not far from Tel Aviv, a 42-year-old Israeli man was killed and seven people were injured, including a mother and her four-year-old son. In the second, at the entrance to the West Bank settlement of Ariel, a short drive away, the victim was an 18-year-old Israeli soldier, and two other Israelis were badly hurt.
The United States reacted by saying: "The Palestinian Authority must act now to dismantle terrorist networks that perpetuate such attacks and to prevent future attacks." A White House spokeswoman, Ms Claire Buchan, said Israel had the right to defend itself, but added that it should bear in mind the consequences of its actions.
Earlier the US Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, had insisted that American peace efforts would not be stopped by "this kind of violence."
But Israel's Prime Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon, declared that there could be no significant progress until the Palestinian Authority Prime Minister, Mr Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), put an end to such attacks by arresting their orchestrators and confiscating their weaponry. Without such action, the Palestinians might never achieve statehood, he said.
Mr Sharon called off the release of some 80 Palestinian prisoners - buses carrying the prisoners had already left the jails and were turned around - and Israeli police spokesmen said they had now returned to the state of high alert for incoming bombers that had been the norm before most Palestinian factions declared the ceasefire at the end of June.
Israel placed a curfew on Nablus, from where both bombers set out, but Israeli officials intimated that no specific military response to the bombings was planned.
Still, the army's Chief-of-Staff, Gen Moshe Ya'alon, said Israel intended to continue to operate in those parts of the West Bank that had not been relinquished to PA control. Where it feared that further bombings were being planned, he said, it would send troops to try and thwart them.
Last Friday, in one such operation in the Nablus area, Israeli troops killed two senior Hamas members, in what it said was a large bomb-making factory. (An Israeli soldier was also killed in that confrontation.)
The two groups behind yesterday's bombings claimed they were avenging those deaths and the deaths of two more Palestinians in fighting later the same day.
But while Hamas, which took responsibility for yesterday's second bombing, said it nevertheless remained committed to the ceasefire, the Al-Aqsa Brigades, an offshoot of Mr Yasser Arafat's Fatah group which carried out the day's first attack, has never joined the ceasefire and said it now planned further attacks.
Mr Abbas cut short a trip to Qatar and hurried home, having condemned "the two attacks against Israelis" and what he called "the recurring Israeli provocations." He pledged that the PA would "work hard to maintain the truce".
In contrast, spokesmen for Mr Arafat, the PA President and still the key Palestinian leader, placed full blame for the bombings on Israel and cited, as further "provocation", Israeli plans to reopen Jerusalem's Temple Mount to the Jewish visitors who have been excluded for most of the past three years.
Mr Sharon was last night meeting a senior US State Department official, Mr William Burns, who had been intending to discuss the controversial security barrier Israel is constructing close to the pre-1967 border with the West Bank.
The Bush administration opposes the fence in principle and shares Palestinian concerns in particular over parts of its route that cut into the West Bank.
But Mr Sharon has continually argued that he is building the fence only to thwart suicide-bombers at what has hitherto been an open border, and Israeli officials said yesterday's blasts only underlined the point.
A Foreign Ministry spokesman said that the first suicide bomber crossed the border precisely where the current construction work has ceased. At Ariel, where the second bomber struck, the head of security asserted that the blast demonstrated how vital it was that the security barrier be routed to encompass the settlement, something the Bush administration has been urging Mr Sharon not to do.
The bombers, both aged 17, carried their devices in backpacks. In the first attack, at a little after 9 a.m., the bomber detonated the device near the supermarket tills. Rescue workers were still cleaning flesh and blood from the shelves nine hours later. In the second blast, the bomber approached a group waiting at a bus-stop.
While yesterday's attacks may not mark the end of the ceasefire, they suggest that even the relative decline in violence of the past six weeks will not last much longer.
Israel blames Mr Abbas for lacking the will to confront Hamas and other extremists. Mr Abbas wants Mr Sharon to boost his standing by releasing more Palestinian prisoners and authorising further military pullbacks.