Son of Palestinian Guerrilla Leader Killed in Beirut
In Separate Attack, Suicide Bomber Strikes Near West Bank
By Joseph Logan
Reuters
BEIRUT (May 20) - A bomb killed the son of Palestinian guerrilla leader Ahmed Jibril in Beirut on Monday, ripping through a car and tearing him to shreds, Lebanese security and Palestinian political sources said.
In northern Israel, a Palestinian blew himself up on Monday in the second suicide bombing in less than 24 hours, despite an unusually fierce condemnation of the tactic by Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority.
''It was Jihad, God rest his soul,'' an official of Jibril's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) said at the site of the blast in Beirut, referring to Mohammad Jihad Ahmed Jibril, who was born in 1961.
The explosion in the Lebanese capital's Mar Elias district scattered body parts around the car and left it twisted and doused with blood, witnesses said.
Israeli authorities had no immediate comment.
Jibril's Damascus-based group is a part of an alliance of radical Palestinian factions that opposes peace negotiations with Israel that Arafat began with the 1993 Oslo accords.
Once famed for its guerrilla operations, it has been largely on the sidelines of the Palestinian uprising against Israel that erupted in 2000, but had claimed responsibility for a shipment of arms Israel intercepted en route to the West Bank a year ago.
Monday's blast in Israel, one day after a suicide attacker killed three people in the seaside town of Netanya, suggested the bombers were back after a lull in Palestinian violence that world leaders have been trying to use to revive peace efforts.
But Israel has kept up raids into West Bank cities, including overnight incursions into Tulkarm and Hebron, where troops detained two men, after winding down the military sweep it unleashed against Palestinian-ruled areas on March 29.
After the Netanya bombing, the Palestinian Authority denounced suicide attacks as ''an absolute danger to our people, its rights and its just cause.''
And in a shift of emphasis, senior U.S. officials have acknowledged that Arafat, held directly responsible by Israel, was unable to prevent all suicide bombings.
PASSENGERS ALERT POLICE
In the latest attack, police said a tall man in jeans and sports shoes tried to board a factory bus at Taanachim Junction in southern Galilee area. When told it was a private bus, he disembarked, but suspicious passengers alerted the police.
The man detonated his explosives when two patrolmen demanded his identity papers. ''He began to move back and then exploded,'' one of the policemen, Nayef Ghanem, told Army Radio.
One policeman was hurt in the blast, which occurred about 15 km (nine miles) from the West Bank city of Jenin, scene of the heaviest fighting in Israel's recent offensive.
Police said the man might have been heading for the Israeli town of Afula, already targeted several times during the Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation.
Israelis had been feeling safer and returning to restaurants, shopping centres and other public places.
Troops have pulled out of reoccupied West Bank cities, but have strangled normal life with checkpoints and travel curbs that ordinary Palestinians find humiliating and punitive.
The Palestinian Authority, responding to fierce Israeli and international pressure, issued its toughest statement yet after what it called the ''terrorist operation'' in Netanya on Sunday.
''These attacks against Israeli civilians contradict the decision of the Palestinian leadership,'' it said, adding that suicide bombings ''brand our people with the charge of terrorism at a time when our people are struggling to regain their land and get rid of the racist occupation and Jewish settlement.''
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) -- from which Jibril's group split years ago -- claimed the Netanya attack. Its leader, Ahmed Saadat, ended up in an internationally supervised Palestinian jail this month under a deal to end Israel's month-long siege of Arafat's headquarters.
UNDERSTANDING FOR ARAFAT
U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney suggested that bombings by radical groups such as the PFLP were beyond Arafat's control, although he said the Palestinian leader should be able to stop attacks by other Palestinian groups, possibly referring to the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, linked to Arafat's Fatah faction.
U.S. National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice took a similar line. ''No one ever asked Yasser Arafat to get 100 percent results. What has been asked of him is 100 percent effort,'' she said in Washington.
Rice also said the Netanya attack ''underscores the importance of reform of the Palestinian Authority...of getting a unified security apparatus that can be accountable and can deal with issues of terrorism and breaking up terrorist networks.''
Many Palestinians are deeply suspicious of reform proposals touted by the United States and Israel, which has made reforms a condition for resuming peace negotiations stalled since 2000.
But Arafat is also under fire from many Palestinians fed up with corruption and inefficiency in his administration.
At least 1,359 Palestinians and 476 Israelis have died in the uprising, which flared in September 2000.
In Cyprus, the European Union's Middle East envoy Miguel Moratinos said an agreement was within reach on distribution of 13 exiled Palestinian militants to European countries, but final word would come from Brussels on Tuesday.
The 13 are being held in a hotel in the Cyprus resort of Larnaca after being exiled at the end of a more than five-week Israeli siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.
REUTERS Reut08:20 05-20-02
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