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Fresh bombing dents ME peace hopes

Sharon vows retaliation for death of 17 Israelis

AFP, Jerusalem
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon headed home yesterday from Washington, vowing to avenge a suicide bombing that killed 17 people in an Israeli pool hall and wiped out a week of progress towards peace.
As he was airborne, a Palestinian teenager seriously wounded himself yesterday in an attempted suicide bombing in northern Israel. The two blasts within 12 hours followed a lull of nearly four weeks in such attacks.
The cabinet scheduled an emergency meeting on Sharon's return to mull a response to Tuesday's carnage outside Tel Aviv, where hospital sources said the bomber and 16 others, including a woman, died. Fifty-five people were wounded, two critically.
Among the options under consideration, Israeli state radio said, were the expulsion of Yasser Arafat from the Palestinian territories just a week after he was freed from a month-long siege at his West Bank base and a
fresh large-scale military operation.
The late Tuesday bombing came just as Sharon was conferring in Washington with US President George W. Bush, and it cast a pall on efforts on several fronts to halt 19 months of Israeli-Palestinian bloodshed.
Sharon scheduled a cabinet meeting late yesterday at an airbase near Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion airport to discuss Tuesday's attack in the industrial suburb of Rishon Letsion.
While the radical Palestinian group Hamas claimed responsibility for the bombing, Sharon laid the blame on Arafat.
The Palestinian Authority, under heavy US pressure to end the suicide bombings but devastated by a nearly six-week-old Israeli military push on the West Bank, vigorously condemned the latest "terrorist" crime.
Arafat also ordered his security forces yesterday to "prevent all terrorist operations against Israeli civilians"
and called on the United States for support in beefing up his police resources.
The Palestinian Authority evacuated all its security service and government buildings in the West Bank town of Ramallah, fearing a swift Israeli reprisal for Tuesday's bombing.
In the second bombing, an 18-year-old Palestinian youth was seriously wounded after his attempted suicide attack backfired about 20 kilometres (12 miles) southeast of the coastal city of Haifa.
Nobody was else was hurt in the blast, which Israel army radio said occurred when part of the explosives the youth was wearing on his body detonated, possibly by accident. No group claimed responsibility.
Bush expressed "disgust" with Tuesday's bombing, the first since seven people were killed in central Jerusalem on April 12 as US Secretary of State Colin Powell started an ill-fated peace mission.
He said he was sending CIA director George Tenet, who developed a series of ceasefire proposals last year, back to the Middle East to help build a unified Palestinian security force.
About Tuesday's blast, one police official said the suicide bomber appeared to have carried the explosives into the Spiel club, in
the industrial suburbs of Tel Aviv, in a large suitcase.
"The terrorist came alone into the place, it appears, carrying a suitcase," said Haim Cohen, police commander of the coastal region.
"He went into the snooker club and blew himself up," Cohen told Israeli public television. "More than 50 people were wounded, some of them seriously."
Officials said several of the injured were taken to hospital in critical condition. The Israeli daily Haaretz said on its website that 11 of the injured were in serious condition.
Amid scenes of mayhem and devastation on the southern outskirts of Tel Aviv, witnesses said the impact of the blast caused the third floor ceiling of the building to collapse, and that the entire club appeared to be destroyed.
Police said they had not yet managed to get all of the bodies and possible survivors out of the building. It was not immediately clear how many people were inside the building at the time of the explosion.
The suicide attack was the first to strike Israel since a young woman suicide bomber killed six other people on April 12 in central Jerusalem and the deadliest since the army launched Operation Defensive Wall on March 29.
In an anonymous phone call to AFP in Jerusalem, a man who said he represented the Ezzedine al-
Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the Hamas Islamic resistance movement, claimed responsibility for the attack.
"We are going to attack within this week and declare the holy war against all the Israelis for what happened last month in Jenin camp by the Israeli army," he said.
The blast immediately caused some senior Israeli minister to question the wisdom of shutting down the army's sweeps of the West Bank, which Sharon had promised to do under strong international pressure.
Meanwhile, Israel continued its sweep for Palestinian militants on the West Bank despite formally declaring an end to its Operation Defensive Shield.