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Scene of carnage after Jerusalem?s bombing
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Scene of carnage after Jerusalem?s bombing
A Palestinian suicide bomber blew apart a bus packed with ultra-Orthodox Jews returning from a holy shrine in Jerusalem, killing at least 20 people including children and dealing a deadly blow to a truce. Body bags piled up so fast in the middle of a roundabout on a Jerusalem street that emergency workers could barely keep from stacking them one on top of the other.
The stench of burnt flesh hung in the air. As mangled bodies were pulled one after another from the shattered double-length bus, workers rushed to sheath them in white plastic. The smaller bundles held the corpses of children, some of them babies in diapers. Zelig Feiner, an official of ZAKA, an ultra-Orthodox burial society that dispatches crews to all Israeli bomb scenes, said the sight they met was as gruesome as any they had encountered in 34 months of Israeli-Palestinian violence.
?It was hopeless?
?There were small babies bleeding on the ground. One of our workers was leaning over an infant, no more than 15 months old, giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation,? he said. A bleeding woman clutched at her hair cropped close in accordance with ultra-Orthodox tradition after her wig was ripped off in the blast. The militant Hamas and Islamic Jihad movements both said they carried out the blast, which police said also wounded about 100 people.
Police said it may have been carried out by a man disguised in the traditional black garb of the ultra-Orthodox Jews. The explosion was one of the worst in three years of violence and further frayed a US-backed peace plan dependent on the seven-week-old truce. Israel later suspended talks on handing back control of four West Bank cities to the Palestinians.
Severed arms, legs and a lower torso lay scattered across the street, and a dead woman lay with her chest blown out. Palestinian Prime Minister, Mahmoud Abbas condemned the blast, saying it ?does not serve the interests of the Palestinian people?. He promised to launch an investigation.
Barry Moody
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