Jerusalem's calm shattered

Three years of relative calm in Jerusalem were shattered yesterday when a bomb exploded at a bus stop, killing a woman and wounding several dozen others.

The explosives, in a bag left alongside a public telephone, went off as passengers were descending from a bus a few metres away.

The blast came hours after an Israeli minister warned that an escalation of rocket and mortar fire from the Gaza Strip in recent days could lead to another Israeli invasion.

It was not immediately clear if the same organisation was behind the Jerusalem bombing and the Gaza incidents.

In the past week some 80 rockets and mortars have been fired from the Gaza Strip.

Some have struck as far away as Beersheba, 40km from Gaza, but only two people were wounded in the attacks. Israel has responded with air and mortar attacks.

On Wednesday, four civilians were killed and eight wounded when Israeli mortar shells struck a Palestinian house.

Israeli officials said the mortars were aimed at a nearby olive grove from which mortars had been fired moments before at an Israeli village.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed regret at the civilian casualties but blamed Hamas for firing from built-up areas.

An 8-year-old Palestinian boy wounded by the mortar fire was transferred to an Israeli hospital after Israel offered to treat civilian casualties.

In an air attack on a car in the strip, four persons identified by Israel as senior operatives of Islamic Jihad were killed.

Ironically, Israel and Hamas have said they wish to avoid escalation.

Israel Radio reported that Robert Seri, a UN special envoy now in the region, delivered Israel a message to that effect yesterday from Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh. Similar statements have been made by Israeli officials. Neither side, however, appears capable of halting the tit-for-tat cycle.

Most of the recent firing from the Gaza Strip is attributed by Israeli officials to Islamic Jihad but Israel holds Hamas responsible since it is in control in Gaza. Israel's Channel Two said Haniyeh phoned Islamic Jihad leaders in Damascus and warned them not to drag Gaza into another war.

The Jerusalem bomb reminded residents of the situation in the three years after the outbreak of the Palestinian intifada in 2000 when dozens of people in Jerusalem were killed by suicide bombers, mostly on buses.

The last terrorist attack occurred three years ago when eight students in a religious school were killed by a gunman.

Police said the woman killed yesterday, in her 50s, carried no identification and may have been a foreigner.

Earlier in the day, Deputy Prime Minister Silvan Shalom threatened that Israel would repeat the incursion into Gaza it carried out two years ago or resume assassinations of Hamas leaders if there was no other way to stop the firing.

"The period of restraint is over."