In the first major attack in Jerusalem in more than four years, a Palestinian gunman burst into a prominent Jewish seminary Thursday and sprayed automatic gunfire at students studying in the library, killing eight and wounding nine before he was shot dead, police and witnesses said.
The attack on the Mercaz Harav yeshiva stoked tensions already heightened by a surge of deadly violence in the Gaza Strip. It cast a pall over efforts to resume Middle East peace talks and was likely to complicate Egyptian attempts to broker a cease-fire between Israel and Palestinian militants in Gaza.
The shooter was not immediately identified, but Israeli media reports, citing security officials, said he was from a Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem.
In Gaza, where a five-day Israeli offensive against militants firing rockets at southern Israel left more than 120 Palestinians dead, Hamas praised the Jerusalem attack but stopped short of claiming responsibility.
Sami Abu Zuhri, a spokesman for the group, said that it “blesses the heroic operation in Jerusalem, which was a natural reaction to the Zionist massacre.”
Celebrations in Gaza
In the streets of Gaza, militants fired in the air, drivers honked their horns, some people gave out candy, and loudspeakers broadcast congratulatory messages.
In Lebanon, Hezbollah’s Al-Manar television said that a previously unknown group called the “Galilee Freedom Battalions — Groups of the Martyr Imad Mughniyeh and Martyrs of Gaza” claimed responsibility for the attack. The claim could not be immediately verified.
Mughniyeh, a senior Hezbollah commander, was killed last month by a car bomb in Syria. Hezbollah blamed Israel, which distanced itself from the bombing.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who on Wednesday persuaded Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to resume peace talks he suspended after the Israeli offensive in Gaza, condemned the yeshiva attack as an “act of terror and depravity.”
President Bush said he had called Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to convey his condolences and told him that “the United States stands firmly with Israel in the face of this terrible attack.”
“This barbaric and vicious attack on innocent civilians deserves the condemnation of every nation,” Bush said in a written statement released by the White House. United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki Moon also condemned what he called a “savage attack.”
In the West Bank, Abbas issued a statement condemning “all attacks that target civilians, whether they are Palestinian or Israeli.”
Rifle hidden in cardboard box
Police said the gunman, his AK-47 assault rifle hidden in a cardboard box, walked through the main gate of the yeshiva and entered the library, where he opened fire with the automatic weapon and a pistol at students gathered to study. Students dived for cover as others, some of them wounded, fled the building.
Avraham Shenberger, a rescue worker who rushed to the seminary from his home nearby, said he heard long bursts of automatic gunfire and cries of terrified students.
“It was like target practice,” he said. “The place was full of blood, and there were horrible screams from the windows: ‘Help! Terrorist!'”
Micky Rosenfeld, a police spokesman, described a scene of carnage in the library after the attack. “The chairs were all on the floor, books were covered with blood,” he said. “It was a real bloodbath in there.”
Jerusalem Police Chief Aharon Franco said the attacker was killed by an off-duty army officer who lives nearby and ran to the seminary after hearing the gunfire, and by two police detectives who were at the scene.
A student, Yitzhak Dadon, said he shot the attacker first with his own pistol. He told Israel Radio that when the shooting started, he climbed out of a window to a porch. “The terrorist went out and started spraying gunfire in the air,” he said. “He stood at the main entrance to the library. … I shot two bullets in his head, and he started to turn. He started swaying and then a fellow with an M-16 … finished him off. We kept shooting at him until we emptied our clips.”
The Mercaz Harav yeshiva may have been targeted because of its symbolic importance. Founded in 1924 by Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, who is considered the father of religious Zionism, the prestigious seminary is a religious nationalist stronghold and the ideological birthplace of the Jewish settlement movement in the West Bank.
Outside the yeshiva building after the attack, scores of onlookers, many of them students of other Orthodox yeshivas, chanted “Death to Arabs!”
Avraham Cohen, 24, a student at Mercaz Harav, said the attack was a result of “weakness and defeatism” plaguing the Israeli government.
“The army isn’t allowed to get the job done,” he said. “Jewish blood is spilled, and we care more about the property of every Arab than our own lives.”
The last major attack in Jerusalem was in February 2004, when a suicide bomber killed 8 people and wounded nearly 60 on a bus.
In other violence Thursday, an Israeli soldier was killed when a bomb exploded near a patrol on Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip. An Israeli air strike in Gaza killed four militants, Palestinian medics said. The army said they were spotted planting a bomb.
Bracing for possible unrest in Jerusalem on Friday, police commanders said they would beef up their forces in the city as Muslim prayers are held at Al Aqsa Mosque and funerals are held for the slain yeshiva students.
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jogreenberg@tribune.com
