Israeli plans to ease a military crackdown in the West Bank were on hold yesterday after a double Palestinian suicide bombing killed three people and wounded 40 others in Tel Aviv, the Defense Ministry said.
The attacks less than a minute apart on Wednesday followed a Palestinian bus ambush which killed seven Israelis near a Jewish settlement in the West Bank on Tuesday, shattering a month of relative calm and undermining hopes of reviving peacemaking.
PHOTO: AFP
Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer's office said plans had been drawn up to lift some of the restrictions imposed on Palestinian civilians since the army reoccupied seven West Bank cities last month but that they had now been frozen.
"Israel is striving to ease the conditions as much as possible for the broader Palestinian population but the Palestinian terror is continuing to perpetuate the suffering [of the population]," it said in a statement.
The army reoccupied seven of the eight Palestinian cities in the West Bank a month ago after back-to-back suicide bombings killed 26 people in Jerusalem, saying the aim was to stop such attacks since a 21-month-old uprising against occupation began.
The attacks in Tel Aviv were the first Palestinian suicide bombings in Israel for a month.
They dispelled hope among Israelis that the army crackdown had ended such attacks and raised the possibility of the army toughening rather than easing its measures.
The fate of talks between Israel and the Palestinians was unclear. Foreign Minister Shimon Peres met moderate Palestinians last week in the sides' first high-level contacts for four months, but follow-up meetings have been postponed.
International efforts to revive peacemaking after 21 months of conflict have made little headway beyond demanding sweeping reforms of the Palestinian Authority and Palestinian presidential and parliamentary elections now set for January.
The two suicide bombers blew themselves up in a foreign workers' neighborhood of Tel Aviv.
Police said two foreign workers were among the three people killed by the bombers, but did not say where they were from. Many of the wounded were also foreign workers.
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