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On day of Bus bombing, PA media launches fresh attack

Arab terrorists exploded a bomb-laden car next to an Israeli civilian bus this evening (Monday) in northern Israel, murdering at least 12 passengers and wounding another 50, several of them critically.

It was the first major terror strike since Israel, under Bush Administration coaxing, began easing measures against the Palestinians and relaying more frozen funds to the regime of Yassir Arafat.

The Islamic Jihad movement claimed responsibility for the attack which it said was aimed both at Israel and against the United States.

“We will continue our struggle against the Zionist entity and against the Zionist administration in Washington that supports it,” declared Muhammad Al-Hindi, a leader of the Islamic Jihad movement appearing on Al-Jazeera Arab satellite television.

Witnesses at the scene of the bus attack near the towns of Afula and Hadera described it as producing particularly grisly results.

“There are eight or nine burnt bodies on the bus,” said Roni Khalfon of the Israeli Fire Service, who said that the Israeli authorities were having trouble removing bodies from the bus which was turned into a charred metal skeleton.

Members of Arafat’s Palestinian Authority refused to condemn the attack and actually seemed to be pleased by the results.

“This shows that the Israelis–(Prime Minister Ariel) Sharon and (Defense Minister Binyamin) Ben-Eliezer have failed with all their security measures,” declared Hatem Abdel-Qader, a leading official of Arafat’s Fatah Movement, as well as the PA Legislature.

The attack came only hours after Israel prepared to pull most of its forces from the Arab town of Hebron and only two days after Israeli army soldiers, who had to fight Israeli demonstrators, removed an Israeli settlement in the Samaria region of the West Bank.

Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, who is fighting to remain the leader of the Israeli Labor Party, has spearheaded these two steps as well as turning over 160-million shekels in frozen tax funds to Arafat’s Palestinian Authority.

But despite the fact that Israel has responded to American pressure in this regard, the Palestinian media have actually escalated their officially supported incitement of America and Israel–sometimes comparing both to bloody murderers or to cockroaches that have to be stamped out ((see cartoons below)).

In a cartoon in Monday’s Al-Hayyat Al-Jadida newspaper, controlled by Arafat, the “Israeli occupation” is compared to a cockroach (wearing a star of David on its head) that has been killed. The cartoon caption reads: “The (Palestinian) Resistance–The Permanent and Final Power (Answer) for the (Israeli) Occupation.”

The same newspaper published a cartoon last week depicting the U.S. and Israeli Prime Minister Sharon as baby-killers.

“It is clear that the way to fight this kind of terror is inside the casbah of Shechem (Nablus), and Israel has had a great deal of success with this approach,” declared Roni Daniel, Israeli Television Channel Two’s Military commentator.

“Overall terror has gone down between 70 to 75 percent,” said Daniel, rejecting the view that Israeli security measures have failed.

He and other experts noted that Israel has enjoyed several months of relative quiet due to a pre-emptive seek-and-arrest policy towards suspected terrorists hiding out in territory still nominally controlled by Arafat’s regime.