apparent show of defiance following the deadliest Palestinian suicide attack in three years which killed at least 20 people, including children.
The blast on Tuesday, August 19, ripped apart a bus packed mostly with religious Jews returning from the Western Wall, eye-witnesses said.
"Stunned children and wailing parents tried to reunite with family members who had been ripped from body parts," added the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem (ICEJ) which supports suffering Jewish people.
Yet in a controversial move, Israeli Minister of Public Security Tzachi Hanegbi made clear his country would not be intimidated by violence and that "Jews and Christians, or anyone who is not Muslim", can not be prevented "from entering the Temple Mount."
ARAFAT
Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat ordered the Temple Mount closed to non-Muslims after riots erupted between police and Muslim worshippers the day after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon visited the site in September 2000.
Sharon’s visit has been blamed by Palestinians for the outbreak of their uprising, or Intifada, more than two years ago. The Israeli prime minister reopened the site in June for several weeks, but police closed it again after tensions grew on the mosque’s plaza.
Although Muslim officials were consulted about the move, the re-opening of the Temple Mount was expected to increase tensions with Palestinian militants including members of Islamic Jihad and Hamas who both claimed responsibility for Tuesday’s bombing.
JIHAD
In a statement to the Cable News Network (CNN) Islamic Jihad said that a "cease-fire was still in place" adding that the attack was "in response" to the killing by Israeli forces of one of its leaders in a gun battle last week.
Meanwhile Israeli television carried images Wednesday, August 20 of a blood-spattered young girl being carried to an ambulance and bodies lined up on a traffic circle, the ICEJ News Service reported.
From his hospital bed, Yaacov Bahar, 35, who helped bring four children from the bus, held his hands as though he were still carrying an infant, reporters observed. "In my eyes, I’m still seeing the nightmare," Bahar was quoted as saying.
SIRENS
The blast sent Jerusalem into a frenzy of eerily familiar activity as ambulance sirens blared through the streets, according to eye-witness accounts. Its force punched out the roof and the sides of the bus and damaged buses in front and behind the one carrying the bomber, the ICEJ News Service and other reports said.
Yehiya Luria, 38, who was seated at the far back, said the bus was "so full that you couldn’t have put a pin in there." "There was a lot of blood on me blood, bits of flesh, teeth, hair," he told newsman.
Ambassadors of the European Union, Italy and Ireland laid a wreath Wednesday, August 20, against a tree and lit 18 candles — matching early estimates of the number of dead — on a roundabout close to where the bomber struck, The Associated Press (AP) reported.
CONDEMNATION
There were also statements of condemnation and condolences from the United States, the European Union, Britain and the United Nations. The blast came just hours after a truck packed with explosives devastated the U.N. headquarters in Iraq, killing at least 20 people, including U.N. Special Envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello
While there was sorrow among survivors and diplomats, some Palestinians apparently celebrated the attack. "Palestinian security prisoners applauded joyously and passed out candy when they learned of the bombing," AP quoted the Israel Prisons Authority as saying in a statement.
The leaders among the inmates were sent into isolation and the rest had their TV sets removed as punishment, the authority added. It came as the bomber, Raed Abdul Hamid Misk, 29, appeared on videotape with a rifle in one hand and a Koran in the other.
PALESTINE
"The people of Palestine commit themselves to cease-fire, but the criminal Sharon refused this commitment and killed many people in Palestine," he said. Misk, a mosque preacher working on his master’s degree at a Nablus university, left behind two children and a wife six months pregnant.
"All his life he was saying, ‘Oh God, I wish to be a martyr,’" his wife was quoted as saying by the ICEJ News Service. Israeli officials reacted angrily to the bombing and have frozen talks with the Palestinian Authority about the transfer of towns to Palestinian control, a move condemned by Palestinian officials.
The latest violence, the third suicide attack since last week, added to the ever increasing death toll in the troubled nation. Since the Intifada began in September 2000, more than 2,400 people have been killed on the Palestinian side and more than 800 on the Israeli side, AP reported.
