August 5, 2002	Monday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 25,1423

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MERON JUNCTION (Israel), Aug 4: Thirteen people were killed as Palestinian factions launched a wave of bloody anti-Israeli attacks on Sunday, with a bus blown apart in northern Israel claiming nine lives, a shooting spree killing three in occupied Al Quds and a rash of other strikes, including a failed seaborne assault by a frogman.

Over 70 people were injured in the attacks from the far north of Israel, where a suicide bomber blew apart the bus, to an attack on a coastal Jewish settlement in the Gaza Strip, in the south, in which an armed Palestinian frogman was shot dead.

The massive eruption of attacks appeared to be the bloody vengeance threatened by all Palestinian factions after an Israeli bombardment killed the military chief of the Hamas and 14 other people, nine of them children, on July 22.

In the bus blast, near a Jewish shrine close to the town of Safad, north of Lake Galilee, a fireball ripped the vehicle apart. Nine people were killed and another 50 injured, several of them seriously. Police said the blast was almost certainly the work of a suicide bomber, though little evidence remained of the perpetrator’s body.

Israeli spokesman Avi Pazner said Israel would fight “without mercy” against the perpetrators of the latest attack.

Hamas’s military wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassem Brigades, said in a statement on Lebanese television the suicide attack was a “further riposte to the killing of our leader Salah Shehade”, blown to pieces in Israel’s internationally criticized air raid on Gaza City.

SHOOTING: Just hours after the bus bombing, a Palestinian man armed with a pistol went on a shooting spree outside the Old City in occupied Al Quds, killing an Israeli before being gunned down in a shootout with the police.

A Palestinian bystander was also killed in the exchange of fire, which left a dozen people wounded.

Seven Israelis were also injured in separate attacks in the West Bank, including four soldiers whose jeep was blown off a settlers’ road near Ramallah in a blast claimed by the secular Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). A Jewish settler was also ambushed in his car near Tulkarem, in the north. Two soldiers who arrived to rescue him were also shot and injured, in an attack claimed by the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed offshoot of the Fatah movement.

News of the bus blast came as the Israeli cabinet gathered for its weekly meeting. Israeli radio said Sharon was still considering moves to try to alleviate the tough situation of the Palestinians locked in their homes by Israeli curfew across the West Bank.

CONTROVERSIAL TACTICS: After its massive re-occupation of the West Bank failed to stem the bombings, Israel approved controversial new tactics to deter bombers, including banishing relatives to the Gaza Strip and demolishing their family homes.

The Israeli army said it blew up nine homes around the West Bank towns of Nablus, Al Khalil and Jenin that belonged to families of militants, sending armed groups a message of the high cost for taking part in attacks against Israel.

The army has also been carrying out a sweeping dragnet for activists in Nablus over the past three days and has detained at least 50 people in the city.—AFP