Posted on 03/30/2003 10:11:10 AM PST by yonif
Eighteen of the wounded in Sunday noon's suicide attack on a Netanya beachfront cafe are still in hospital.
A young man, apparently a soldier, who was very severely wounded in the attack while preventing the bomber from entering Netanya's London Cafe, was transferred from Netanya's Laniado Hospital to the Hadassah Ein Karm medical complex in Jerusalem Sunday evening.
The other seventeen wounded were in either moderate or light condition. More than 30 people were initially wounded in the attack.
The terrorist who carried out the attack was earlier identified as 19-year-old Rami Ghanem from the village of Deir Al Ghassoon near the northern West Bank town of Tulkarem.
Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the attack. The organization's secretary, Dr. Ramadan Shallah, spoke to Qatar-based Al Jazeera satellite television in Damascus, saying: "This is our way of showing solidarity with the people of Iraq. " The bombing, he added, was a "gift to the heroic Iraqi people" of Iraq and that Islamic Jihad had sent volunteers for suicide missions to Baghdad.
The militant group later said a vanguard of Palestinians has arrived from Arab countries in Baghdad, ready to kill American and British soldiers in suicide missions. However, security analysts suggest taking Islamic Jihad's threats with a grain of salt.
In what was the first suicide bombing since the start of the US-led war in Iraq, Ghanem blew himself up outside the crowded London Cafe in the Mediterranean coastal city of Netanya, wounding about 30 people, two of them critically.
One of the wounded was a soldier who prevented the terrorist from entering the cafe on the Netanya Pedestrian Mall on Herzl Street, forcing him to detonate his explosives outside, thus limiting the number of casualties.
"I heard a very loud explosion, and then a body lying in pieces nearby," Henry Ashkenazi, a witness, said. Shortly afterward the entire street was littered with scorches bits of food, clothing, and the terrorist's remains.
Some 35 people were taken to Netanya's Laniado Hospital, Hillel Yaffe Hospital in Hadera and Meir Hospital in Kfar Sava following the attack.
Police was combing the area afterwards, suspecting other terrorists could be about. Officials said there were dozens of warnings of additional plots to carry out attacks.
Police said that in breach of security regulations, there apparently was no security guard posted outside the cafe to challenge the terrorist.
"I saw a person trying to get inside and the guard didn't let him in. The terrorist went over to the side and blew himself up," a witness, Reuven, said.
The attack was the first suicide bombing since the onset of Operation Iraqi Freedom nearly two weeks ago. Israel has been on the alert for fear there would be more attacks during this period. It also came as police were on high alert while Arab-Israelis marked the annual Land Day, a day commemorating the killing of six Arab-Israelis by police during a protest over lands confiscated by the IDF in 1976.
"The (Palestinian) motivation to harm Israel and to help the Iraqi struggle is well known to us and it comes across in all the intelligence reports," Internal Security Minister Tzahi Hanegbi said.
Netanya, a coastal city north of Tel Aviv, has been the site of numerous terror attacks since the outbreak of a Palestinian uprising in September 2000. The city was also the site of the worst terror attack of this period, the March 27, 2002 attack on Pessah (Passover) eve at the Park Hotel, in which 29 people were killed. That attack triggered Operation Defensive Shield, when IDF troops launched massive raids on terrorist strongholds in the West Bank, particularly the areas of Jenin and Nablus.
"We are living in tension all the time, we are always on edge, we secure every event here. We cannot prevent everything," Feierberg said.
The last suicide bomb attack in Israel was March 5 when a terrorist from Hebron blew himself up on a bus killing 17 people.
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