victory party Friday November 29, to deal with several terrorist attacks that have shocked Israeli’s around the world.
On Friday, November 29, Sharon’s official plane safely delivered 235 weary Israeli tourists from Kenya, including 15 people injured in the suicide bombing that reportedly killed 15 people at a hotel near the Kenyan town Mombasa a day earlier.
Bodies of three Israelis killed in the attack were also on board, the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem (ICEJ) News Service said. "The situation is a disaster. An Israeli does not know where to go," passenger Yossi Msika told reporters as he boarded the plane.
The Israeli army reportedly sent 150 doctors, psychologists, and soldiers to the site of the terror attack on Kenya’s Indian Ocean coast after nine Kenyans, three Israelis and three suicide bombers were killed in the Thursday morning explosion.
PARADISE HOTEL
About five minutes before the blast at the Paradise Hotel, 20 kilometres north (apr. 12 miles) of the port of Mombasa, two missiles streaked past a Boeing 757 charter aircraft owned by Arkia Airlines as it left the Mombasa airport for Tel Aviv.
The ICEJ News Service quoted police spokesman Jesse Mituki as saying that witnesses saw "how missiles were fired from a four-wheel drive vehicle 1.6 kilometers (about 1 mile) from the airport." However the plane with 261 passengers and 10 crewmembers landed safely in Tel Aviv later in the day with no casualties.
The attacks were believed to be carried out by sympathizers of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network, which has claimed responsibility for the 1998 United States embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.
SECURITY POLICY
Those attacks left 219 and 12 people dead respectively, not 437 as was understood by BosNewsLife and other news wires on Thursday, November 28.
The violence added to a sense of urgency for Prime Minister Sharon to use his Lukud backing to formulate a new security policy ahead of the upcoming national elections in January next year.
Results of Thursday’s primary showed that Sharon managed to beat his chief rival and Foreign Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in Thursday’s party primary by 16 percentage points, 56 to 40 percent.
VIOLENCE IN ISRAEL
The voting took place, despite violence in Israel itself when Palestinian militants from the Fatah group shot dead 5 Israelis Thursday, November 28, at a at a branch office of the Likud party in the town of Beit She’an. A six person reportedly also died Friday, November 29, of his wounds.
In Gaza, Israeli soldiers were meanwhile searching for the Palestinian infiltrator who Friday morning broke into an Israeli agricultural area and opened fire, injuring three people, the ICEJ News Service said. Two Thai workers were said to be "in moderate to serious condition" and an Israeli was lightly injured.
