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Israel Threatens to Retaliate After Another Suicide Bombing Attack
Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer said Wednesday that Israel will not let anyone who had hurt Israelis go unpunished after another bombing attack, the third in the last 24 hours, killed three and wounded four Wednesday morning.
"We will deal with them (the attackers) one by one, we will catch them one by one," Eliezer told Israel Radio, "Not one of the murderers will escape."
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has announced that he will convene an emergency security cabinet meeting Wednesday afternoon at 17:00 (1500 GMT) to discuss Israel's reactions to the wave of bombing attacks.
A suicide bomber set off a powerful explosive device Wednesday morning near an Israeli gas station, named Mifgash Hashalom, or Peace Meeting, at the southern entrance of the West Bank town of Qalqilya, some 55 kilometers northwest of Jerusalem,
The explosion killed the suicide bomber and two Israelis, wounding four others, one of them seriously.
An official in Israel police spokesman's office told Xinhua that the blast was "a suicide terrorist attack by Palestinian extremists."
Initial reports he received said that a Palestinian got off a van from Qalqilya and detonated the charge adjacent to a group of youths, aged between 12 to 17, who were waiting for school bus at the location. All the Israeli casualties are teenagers.
Ezz-Eddin Al-Kassam, the military wing of the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, has claimed responsibility for the bombing attack.
Wednesday morning's blast was the third against Israeli targets in 24 hours. A car bomb exploded near a Jerusalem shopping mall Tuesday morning, lightly wounding at least seven persons and suicide bomber blasted a bomb near a bus in the French Hill region in northern Jerusalem Tuesday noon, killing himself and wounding at least 37, some of them critically.
Also Wednesday morning, police sappers successfully defused a bomb near an open-air market in Netanya, a coastal city some 70 kilometers northwest of Jerusalem, avoiding another disaster.
Another bomb in the parking lot of a market in Petah Tikva, just outside Tel Aviv, was discharged by policemen Wednesday morning.
Israeli police sources believed that all the attacks coincided with the two-day Arab League summit, the first in a decade, which opened Tuesday morning in the Jordanian capital Amman to discuss among others the Palestinian Intifada, or uprising, against Israel and the stalled Middle East peace process.
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