The Hindu : `Foreign hand' worries Israel

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, May 03, 2003

International

International

`Foreign hand' worries Israel

JERUSALEM MAY 2. Police scoured the Tel Aviv area on Friday for a British man who fled from a bar where his British accomplice blew himself up, and detectives responded to dozens of calls from residents who reported seeing the man.

Israeli terrorism experts warned that foreign involvement could catapult the two-year conflict with the Palestinians to a new level.

Police identified the attacker who blew up ``Mike's Place,'' a Tel Aviv bar, early on Wednesday as Asif Hanif (21), from a London suburb. The blast, the first of 89 suicide bombings in the current round of violence carried out by a foreigner, killed a waitress and two musicians at the pub.

Then police said another bomber, Omar Khan Sharif (27), also British, escaped after his explosive charge malfunctioned. ``The nightmare scenario has come true,'' wrote the military analyst, Alex Fishman, in the Yediot Ahronot daily. ``These terrorists did exactly what happened in the United States on Sept. 11.''

Analysts agreed that foreign involvement in the already bloody Palestinian-Israeli conflict was a grave development, but there was little surprise.

``The international terror movement has been interested in Israel for a long time,'' said Yoni Fighel of Israel's International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism.

Mass funeral

Meanwhile, thousands of Palestinians in Gaza Strip took to the streets on Friday for a mass funeral of 12 Palestinians, including two teenagers and a chief bomb-maker, killed when Israeli troops stormed a Hamas stronghold.

Gunmen marching among the crowd called for revenge and one armed militiaman speaking from a loudspeaker warned the new Palestinian Government against cooperating with a new Mideast peace plan or trying to disarm Palestinian militias.

Palestinian officials and Israeli Opposition leaders accused the Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, of using the Thursday raid in Gaza to undercut the new Palestinian Prime Minister, Mahmoud Abbas, before he has a chance to fulfill a promise to get armed groups to stop their fight against Israel. A 13th person killed in that battle, 2-year-old Amer Ayad, was buried on Thursday. The boy was hit by a bullet to the head while he was near a window in his home, his father said. Also among the dead were eight gunmen and four other civilians — including two boys, ages 13 and 15, a taxi driver and a mentally handicapped man.

A crowd carried their bodies on stretchers from a morgue and along a main street, some shouting for revenge and firing rifle shots into the air. A gunman from the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade, a militia linked to Abbas' own Fatah party, stood on the roof of a moving car and used a loudspeaker to shout a message for the new Palestinian Prime Minister.

A Sharon adviser said Israel would not halt its anti-terror campaign and would not give Mr. Abbas, sworn in on Wednesday, a grace period to crack down on militants. — AP

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