Dmitry
Zaks
JERUSALEM, April 12 (AFP) -
A woman suicide bomber killed six people in Jerusalem on Friday, sending a
bloody message of welcome to US Secretary of State Colin Powell on his first day
of talks here trying to end the Middle East bloodshed.
The attack dealt a second blow to Powell's peace bid hours after he failed to
get Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to commit to a deadline for ending
Israel's army offensive on Palestinians in the West Bank.
A militant offshoot of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement claimed responsibility for the bombing, which police said killed six people as well as the young attacker, and left more than 80 wounded, some seriously.
"This is the blood of a Jew spilling on me," one woman cried as she cradled a wounded teenaged girl in her arms. "They know when to strike us when it inflicts the most pain."
The United States tightened the screws on Arafat, delaying a planned meeting for Saturday between Powell and the aging Palestinian leader who has been trapped since March 29 by Israeli troops in his Ramallah headquarters in the West Bank.
"In light of today's developments, the secretary will not be meeting with Chairman Arafat Saturday," spokesman Richard Boucher said about 10 hours before the talks had been set to be held in Arafat's battered Ramallah compound.
However, he said Powell was not abandoning his critical Middle East peace mission and said the secretary could meet Arafat at a later date "if conditions permit."
"We'll see," Boucher said.
A senior State Department official said a meeting could be held on Sunday -- as a senior Palestinian official said late Friday -- but that no arrangements had yet been made.
The move was clearly aimed at pressuring Arafat to make a statement in Arabic renouncing and rejecting terrorism, including Friday's bombing, a key demand the United States has repeatedly made to the Palestinian leader.
"The secretary condemns in the strongest possible terms today's terrorist attack and he expects Chairman Arafat to do so as well," Boucher said of the bombing.
"It is important that Chairman Arafat not miss this opportunity to take a clear stance against the violence that harms the Palestinians' cause."
In Washington on Friday, President George W. Bush also called on Arafat to denounce the attack.
"Today would be a particularly apt day for Yasser Arafat to publicly express himself in denunciation of this terrorist attack and to show leadership," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said.
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan called for international troops to be sent in to restore order, calling the spiralling violence "an affront to the conscience of mankind." Israel has rejected calls for outside forces.
The explosion ripped a commuter bus to pieces outside a crowded market on the Jaffa Road, a frequent target of suicide bombers, where hundreds of people were doing last-minute shopping before the Jewish Sabbath began.
Police said the woman tried to board the bus after being stopped from entering the market by police officers.
The second suicide attack in Israel in three days seemed intended to mock Sharon's insistence that the two-week army onslaught against the Palestinians was bringing attacks on Israelis to an end.
Mohammad Dahlan, an Arafat security boss in the Gaza Strip, said it was "the result of the resentment Ariel Sharon caused with the massacres and crimes perpetrated against the Palestinian people."
Israeli government spokesman Daniel Seaman told AFP: "If the state of Israel did not defend itself, this would happen every day."
At a joint press conference before the attack, Sharon again defied US calls to end the assault on the Palestinians launched March 29 after another suicide attack killed 28 people in the resort town of Netanya.
He again stressed Israel was in a "war" to end Palestinian terror attacks that was not yet finished. Powell said he had not been able to get a schedule for an end to the campaign from the Israeli leader during their talks.
"I don't have a specific answer on timing," Powell said. Sharon said he hoped it would end "soon" but did not specify.
The West Bank onslaught has left Israel isolated diplomatically and enraged much of the Arab world, where leaders have warned the United States its interests are at stake if the Israelis do not stand down.
Egypt, along with Jordan the only Arab nation to have ties with Israel, announced it was cancelling flights to the Jewish state. Jordan's King Abdullah II has warned its relationship was in danger.
Washington fears the conflict could escalate into a broader war as it tries to craft a new Middle East strategy in the wake of the September 11 attacks in the United States, including a possible attack on Iraq.
Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon again bombarded Israeli positions in the disputed Shebaa Farms border area, sparking retaliatory air raids. Powell, getting an army briefing near the border, said a shell landed during the talks.
Powell called on regional nations, "especially Syria," to rein in Hezbollah, which is also backed by Iran and helped expel Israeli forces from south Lebanon in May 2000 after 22 years of occupation.
The Israeli army is deployed in force across much of the West Bank, and controls most major Palestinian towns, including Jenin, site of a ferocious week-long battle that ended Thursday.
Saeb Erakat, the senior Palestinian official who led his side's delegations when peace talks were still being held with Israel, called on Powell to visit the Jenin camp himself and asked the United Nations to take action.
"We call on the United Nations to immediately create an international commission of inquiry on the Israeli massacres at Jenin because it is a UN-administered refugee camp," he said.
Israel declared much of the West Bank a closed military area and reporters were barred from combat areas, making death tolls and other claims inpossible to verify independently.
But reports of wide destruction, civilian deaths and a looming humanitarian catastrophe on land handed to the Palestinians under interim peace deals in the 1990s have exposed Israel to international outrage.
An Israeli spokesman said 250 Palestinians were believed killed in the Jenin camp.
Israeli security sources told AFP the suicide bomber was a young woman from the southern West Bank city of Hebron, which along with Jericho are the only two major towns not to have been targeted in the Israeli campaign so far.
The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a designated terrorist group according to the US State Department and an offshoot of Arafat's Fatah faction, claimed responsibility for the killing in a call to Hezbollah television in Lebanon.
Meanwhile an armed standoff since April 2 in Bethlehem at one of Christianity's holiest sites, the Church of the Nativity, showed no sign of letting up.
Around 200 Palestinian gunmen, holed up inside along with some clergy and civilians and surrounded by the Israeli army outside, issued a call for Annan and Pope John Paul II to help them.
Around
2,000 people have been killed since the Palestinian uprising began on September
2000, the overwhelming majority of them Palestinians.
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