Israeli troops searched a West Bank village Saturday for proof of wider terror activity after a Palestinian chemistry teacher blew himself up while apparently trying to build a bomb.
Israeli border police, meanwhile, shot and killed a Palestinian man at a West Bank checkpoint after the driver of the car in which he was a passenger ignored orders to stop. In Jerusalem, a Jewish seminarian was stabbed in an apparent scuffle in the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City, escaping with a minor wound to the neck.
The case of the failed bomb-builder was particularly ominous because of where it occurred: Rafat, a village near the West Bank city of Nablus that was the home of Yehiyeh Ayyash, the chief bomb-maker for the radical group Hamas. Ayyash was blown up with an explosives-rigged mobile telephone in a January 1996 operation widely attributed to Israel.
Rafat remains a Hamas stronghold, and Israel’s army and Shin Bet intelligence service were investigating possible Hamas links on the part of the dead chemistry teacher, 23-year-old Badran Abdo. He died instantly in the Friday night blast at his family home.
Abdo’s mother was quoted by Israel’s army radio as saying she believed the explosion was caused by a gas balloon, but authorities said evidence pointed to a bomb-building effort. A relative of the late Hamas bomb chief was detained for questioning.
