By
The Associated Press
JERUSALEM - A thunderous car bomb killed two Israelis near a crowded Jerusalem market yesterday, escalating tensions as Israeli and Palestinian leaders prepared - and then delayed - a truce announcement meant to end five weeks of fighting.
Islamic militants claimed responsibility for the blast, which took the life of the daughter of a right-wing Israeli political leader. Elsewhere, Palestinian areas were again aflame, with two Palestinians killed and at least 80 injured in the West Bank, doctors and rescue workers said.
The violence endangered, but did not immediately destroy, the latest in a series of cease-fire proposals.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat initially planned to simultaneously declare a truce at 2 p.m. The announcements were delayed with the expectation they would come a few hours later.
But shortly after 3 p.m., the car bomb exploded on a narrow residential street less than 200 yards from the congested Mahane Yehuda market.
Flames leaped high into the air, sending up huge black plumes of black smoke as wailing ambulances converged on the working-class area lined with old stone apartment buildings. Eleven people were slightly injured in addition to the two killed, officials said.
Police identified the dead as Hanan Levy, 32, and Ayelet Hashahar-Levy. They were not related.
Ayelet Hashahar-Levy was the daughter of Yitzhak Levy, leader of the National Religious Party. Yitzhak Levy has served as a minister in several Israeli governments, including Barak's. He left his post in Barak's government because of disagreements over the peace process.
His daughter had just moved to Jerusalem and was bringing her belongings to a house in the area at the time of the explosion, police said. One witness said he tried to pull her from the flames.
"I saw her on the ground and her legs had been blown off," said Yaakov Hassoum, who owns a store nearby. "I hoped she was alive, but she was dead."
Hundreds of onlookers clogged the streets as policemen pushed the crowd back. Some young Israelis chanted, "Death to Arabs" and "We want revenge."
A group calling itself the military wing of the Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement faxed to The Associated Press office in Damascus, Syria. The statement said the group carried out the bombing "in reply to the enemy's crimes against our Palestinian people" and promised more attacks.
Israel said earlier it believed that Palestinian militants, either from Islamic Jihad or Hamas, were responsible. Both have been threatening attacks.
Still, Israel said it was standing by the truce reached Wednesday night in a meeting between Arafat and Israeli elder statesman Shimon Peres. The agreement is intended to stop the fighting and open the borders of closed-off Palestinian areas.
Arafat planned to convene his Cabinet later yesterday but had no immediate reaction to the Jerusalem bombing. Before the blast, Arafat's office issued a statement urging Palestinians to "stick to peaceful means" in protests, in line with the cease-fire agreement.
"We are still waiting for (Arafat) to come before his people and convey a big message about the need to stop the violence," Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami said in New York after a meeting with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
As of yesterday evening, neither side had formally announced the truce. There was no word on when such an announcement might happen, if at all.
"We were reminded once again in Jerusalem that there are those who seek to destroy the peace through acts of terror," President Clinton said at the White House. "This cannot be permitted to prevail."
A traffic officer said he had placed a parking ticket on the car about 15 minutes before the explosion because it did not have a permit to park on the crowded street, army radio reported.
"The car was hot when I touched it," said the officer, identified only as Danny. "I did not see anything suspicious. Maybe it parked a minute or a minute and a half before I came."
Israeli Police Commissioner Yehuda Wilk said the car was rigged with a large quantities of explosives. A heavy police presence apparently deterred the assailants from trying to hit the market itself, which would have resulted in many more casualties.
The market is closed to vehicular traffic during shopping hours.
Earlier in the day, Israel pulled back tanks from friction points in the region and Palestinian police restrained rock throwers - the first tentative steps to carry out the planned truce.
However, a firefight broke out yesterday afternoon between Palestinian gunmen and Israeli troops in the West Bank village of Al Khader, the scene of intense fighting a day earlier, and a Palestinian was killed. A second Palestinian was killed in Hizme, on the West Bank near Jerusalem.
The deaths in Jerusalem and the West Bank brought to 165 the number killed in 36 days of Israeli-Palestinian fighting, the worst violence since the two sides began peace negotiations in 1993. Most of the victims have been Palestinians.
The market blast was the second in Jewish west Jerusalem in less than 24 hours. On Wednesday evening, a small explosion occurred outside a Jerusalem theater.
For years, the large market - spread over several blocks of a predominantly religious neighborhood - has been a prime target for extremists trying to sabotage peace. Hamas claimed responsibility for a November 1998 car bomb that killed two suicide bombers. In 1997, two militants blew themselves up in the area, also killing 16 shoppers.
After Barak was elected in May 1998, Israel and the Palestinian territories went more than a year without a fatal bombing attack. However, an Israeli soldier was killed on Sept. 27 in a roadside bombing in the Gaza Strip, and a suicide bomber blew himself up outside the wall of an Israeli army post in Gaza on Oct. 26.
