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Israel Retaliates for Deadly Jerusalem Bombing

August 10, 2001

Israeli security forces seized Palestinian offices in Jerusalem Friday and destroyed a Palestinian police headquarters in the West Bank in response to a Palestinian suicide bombing that killed at least 15 people and wounded about 90 others.

Hours after the bombing, Israeli police stormed and took control of the unofficial Palestinian headquarters in eastern Jerusalem known as Orient House. Israeli forces also took over the mayor's home in Abu Dis, on the edge of Jerusalem, and nearby offices that Israel says serve as command centers for various Palestinian security services. Abu Dis has been proposed as the possible seat of government for a future Palestinian state.

Israeli warplanes blasted a Palestinian police station in the West Bank city of Ramallah. The building had been evacuated and no casualties were reported.

The moves came after a Palestinian suicide bombing in a crowded Jerusalem restaurant that was one of the deadliest attacks in more than ten months of Palestinian terrorism. The Palestinian terrorist group Hamas claimed responsibility for the bombing. The dead include five children and an American woman.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon held lengthy meetings with top security officials to discuss the government's response to the latest attack. Cabinet Secretary Gideon Saar told reporters that Israel would maintain its policy of refusing to negotiate with the Palestinians as long as the violence continues. "We still hope that the Palestinians will understand that it is inconceivable to live in a situation in which our citizens are attacked, shot, killed, injured by the Palestinians, and people will expect us to go on with the peace process,' he said. "We are not, we are not going to negotiate under fire.'

President Bush and other world leaders expressed outrage over the suicide bombing. Bush labeled the attack "cowardly," and called on Arafat to take "immediate and sustained" action to prevent further bombings.

Hitler's Willing Executioners
Ordinary Germans & the Holocaust
by Daniel Goldhagen
Goldhagen reaches conclusions that are both uncompromising and savage, rejecting as inadequate the conventional historical explanations for how an entire country could allow the Holocaust to happen, and gives the first detailed, broad-ranging account of the actual killers of the Jews.