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| Israel-Palestine-Jordan |
| Gunman was Arab working at the school |
| 2008-03-07 |
| THE man who shot dead eight students at a right-wing Jewish institute in Jerusalem on Thursday is believed to be a former Arab employee of the organisation who was recently held for two months by Israeli police. Residents of the killer's neighbourhood in Arab East Jerusalem named the attacker as Alaa Abu Dheim, 20, a former driver at the Mercaz Harav yeshiva (Jewish religious school). They told journalists that the man had been arrested by police four months ago and then released two months later. Armed with a Kalashnikov rifle and a pistol, the lone gunman burst into the school's library at 8.30 pm Thursday local time and killed eight youths and young men before he himself was shot. While no claim of responsibility has been confirmed, Hezbollah's television station in Lebanon reported that a hitherto unknown group calling itself the "Galilee Freedom Battalions - the Martyrs of Imad Mughniyeh" said it carried out the attack. The Galilee is a mainly Arab-populated region of northern Israel, while Imad Mughniyeh was a Hezbollah leader killed in a mysterious car bomb attack in Damascus last month. Yesterday's attack was the biggest death toll in Israel since a suicide bomber killed 11 at a Tel Aviv falafel stand almost two years ago. It was the first major terrorist attack in Jerusalem since a suicide bomber killed seven bus passengers in February 2004. Large numbers of police were patrolling Jerusalem last night in response to the attack. Both the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships said that it would not derail flagging peace talks. The incident brings to at least 62 the number of civilians killed in the 10 days since Israel's assassination of five Hamas leaders, in response to a fatal rocket attack in the Israeli town of Sderot. Most of those who died were Palestinians killed in the Gaza Strip last weekend where, according to the United Nations and other human rights groups, 120 people were killed, at least 52 of them civilians including 27 children. There is speculation in the Israeli media that the Mercaz Harav yeshiva was targeted because of its role as the cradle and spiritual centre of Israel's far-right religious settler movement. "This was not an accidental arrival at some city's commercial centre and the setting off [of] an explosive charge," wrote the Ha'aretz defence correspondent Avi Issacharoff. He continued: "The perpetrator knew where he was heading and that many armed young men would be there." The mass daily Ma'ariv reported that "those who planned, who sent and who carried out the terror attack can say today that they succeeded in striking a harsh blow to the very place from where the occupation sprung". The attack resembled in its execution the 1994 incident in which Baruch Goldstein, a physician and member of the religious settler movement, shot dead 29 Palestinian worshippers in a Hebron mosque before he was killed by survivors. One student at the yeshiva claimed to have shot the attacker twice in the head with his weapon. Police say the attacker was killed by an off-duty army officer who rushed to the rescue when he heard shooting. The incident has been widely condemned by foreign governments and by the UN secretary-general, Ban Ki Moon. A US attempt to pass a statement condemning the shootings, together with an attack on Israeli troops in Gaza, failed after a UN Security Council member, Libya, said the resolution should also include condemnation of Israel's killings of civilians in Gaza. Israel's Foreign Ministry said that the attack "expresses at its most deplorable the fundamentalist-extremist foundations, in the name of which Palestinian terrorism operates Â… Israel expects the nations of the world to support it in its war against those who murder students, women and children." The Palestinian Authority chairman, Mahmoud Abbas, also condemned the attack on the yeshiva. |
| Posted by:tipper |
| #3 I'd bury this bastard wrapped in a pigskin, bulldoze his family's house and deport the lot of them to Gaza with nothing more than the clothes on their backs. And I'd consider that much kinder treatment than they deserved. |
| Posted by: Pancho Elmeck8414 2008-03-07 18:22 |
| #2 Over 2,000,000 Christians have been coerced out of Arab majority sections of Palestine, since WW2. We need to declare Temple Mount a Judaeo-Christian Heritage site, and enforce a Muslim free zone around the area.And I am with the Kahanists on giving the Arab the boot from Israel. Arabs aren't an original people in what was once Roman Palestine. Prior to Christianity, there were Baal worshipping Phoenicians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, etc. None of those peoples either spoke Arabic or were of that ethnicity. Greeks have a stronger claim to the Levant than the arab. |
| Posted by: McZoid 2008-03-07 17:58 |
| #1 I can't help but ask the obvious. Do you think that finally, Israel will realize that allowing the enemy to mingle within Israel's population is a massive mistake and requires an immediate resolution ? Also, will Israel finally take necessary measures to even the score ? I say there is no option for Israel but war for space and blood payment or this terrorism will never cease. |
| Posted by: wxjames 2008-03-07 12:36 |