ROSH HA’AYIN (Israel), Aug 12: Two Palestinian suicide bombers killed two Israelis in attacks barely an hour apart on Tuesday, shattering six weeks of relative calm ushered in by a ceasefire declared by Palestinian militants.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said after the bombings, at an Israeli supermarket and a West Bank bus stop, that peacemaking would go nowhere unless the Palestinian Authority cracked down on militants.

But a senior member of Mr Sharon’s cabinet said Israel had not given up on a two-month-old, roadmap despite the attacks.

“We are not prepared to come to terms with such attacks, but I do not believe we have reached the point where the Israeli government says it has failed in its efforts to achieve calm and to try to move forward in the (peace) process,” Vice Premier Ehud Olmert said in an interview with Channel One television.

The armed wing of the Hamas group claimed responsibility for the West Bank blast in a statement on its Internet site, saying it was avenging Israel’s assassination of two members in a raid in the city of Nablus last week.

The Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed offshoot of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat’s mainstream Fatah movement, said it carried out the supermarket attack for the same reason. Two Palestinian civilians were killed in the Nablus raid.

Palestinian faction spokesmen, including one from Hamas, said the truce in a 34-month-old uprising for an independent Palestinian state remained in effect.

In Washington, US Secretary of State Colin Powell said in a speech to a group of Israeli and Arab students: “We will continue to move forward on the roadmap... We will not be stopped by bombs.”

But political fallout from the bombings came fast as Israel postponed a release of 76 Palestinian prisoners, some of whom were already on a bus that pulled halfway out of a prison’s gates and then reversed back inside after news of the attacks.

The Palestinians’ reformist leadership wants thousands freed to reduce the popularity of militants opposed to peace moves.—Reuters