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Hamas claims Jerusalem attack
07/03/2008 20:09 - (SA)
Jerusalem - Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist movement, claimed responsibility on Friday for the shooting attack in Jerusalem the previous evening in which a local gunman killed eight students at a Jewish religious school.
There was no immediate comment from the Israeli government, which mounted a major offensive in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip last week but which pledged after Thursday's shooting to push on with peace negotiations with Hamas's secular rivals in the West Bank.
"The Hamas movement announces its full responsibility for the Jerusalem operation," a Hamas official said in Gaza.
"The movement will release the details at a later stage," he added. He spoke on condition of anonymity.
After the bloodiest attack in Israel in two years and the first in Jerusalem in four, Israel clamped down on the city and the occupied West Bank. Thousands attended funerals for the victims, aged 15 to 26. Police set up roadblocks and troops tightened limits on Palestinian travel from the West Bank.
The gunman, whose family in Arab East Jerusalem said he once worked as a driver for the college, was shot dead after opening fire with an automatic rifle at students in the library. The Merkaz Harav seminary has long been an ideological base for the Jewish settler movement in the Palestinian territories.
Hamas flags and banners of other Islamist groups flew at the home of Ala Abu Dhaim after what proved to be a suicide mission.
The Israeli government said it would not be diverted from peace talks, despite public anger. Security Minister Avi Dichter was quoted on Army Radio, however, as saying hostile Arabs should be moved from Jerusalem to the West Bank.
Complicating peace talks
Israeli President Shimon Peres denounced the attack as "barbaric" because the young yeshiva students were in a place of prayer and had "nothing to do with war".
The attack had been immediately greeted with celebrations in Gaza, where an Israeli offensive that ended on Monday killed more than 120 Palestinians, about half of them civilians.
The Jerusalem shooting could further complicate US-backed peace talks between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
Hamas's claim may also undermine tentative talks undertaken by Egypt and encouraged by Washington to foster a truce between the group and Israel.
Israel said negotiations with Abbas would continue but demanded that he to do more to rein in militants - Abu Dhaim, however, lived in Jerusalem, under full Israeli control.
"If Israel really wants to solve all these problems, Israel must look to the negotiations," said Abbas aide Nabil Amr.
- Reuters
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