March 6, 2002
Shock and Anger as Violence Invades an Arab Schoolyard
By JOEL GREENBERG
ERUSALEM, March 5 — As hundreds of Palestinian boys filled a schoolyard in the Arab village of Sur Bahir in southern Jerusalem this morning, the headmaster and two teachers noticed an unusual V- shaped contraption under a cluster of pine trees in a corner of the yard.
They saw two metallic-looking gray cones, each about a foot and a half long, lying on their sides next to a round object, apparently a timer, that was partly covered with soil. The wide ends of the cones, sealed with styrofoam, were aimed at different parts of the schoolyard, where more than 400 boys, mostly junior high school students, were milling about.
The deputy headmaster called the police, and the boys were told to keep their distance. They were ushered into class 10 minutes early, without the usual lineup in the schoolyard for morning exercises.
Minutes later the cones exploded, spraying bullets and jagged bits of metal across the schoolyard. Classroom windows shattered as the boys dived under their desks. The bomb left a crater under the pine trees, sheared off branches and blew off a section of a steel fence.
"If we had been doing exercises, all the boys would now have been either in the hospital or in the graveyard," said Sabri Huweis, one of the teachers who discovered the device.
Muatazz Dabash, 15, a student, said: "It was a very strong explosion and there was a lot of dust, and fire. Glass flew on our faces, and boys were screaming and crying. Everyone was afraid."
Two dozen schoolboys and two staff members were hurt by shrapnel, glass shards or by the impact of the bomb but no one was seriously injured, the local clinic reported.
An Israel Radio reporter received a pager message saying that a group calling itself Revenge of the Infants had carried out the bombing to avenge the killing of Jewish children by Palestinian attackers. Four Israeli children, two of them babies, were killed in a suicide bombing in Jerusalem along with six other people on Saturday night.
The Jerusalem police chief, Micky Levy, said he had set up a team to investigate the attack and the group's claim.
There have been several deadly shootings of Palestinian motorists in the West Bank, apparently by Jewish militants retaliating for the killing of dozens of Israeli settlers on the roads during the current uprising, but the bombing today was the first such attack against Palestinians in more than 17 months of violence. It recalled bombings in the early 1980's by an underground group made up largely of Jewish settlers, who were later arrested and jailed.
On a visit to the school, Mayor Ehud Olmert suggested that the bombing might have been a provocation by Palestinian militants.
"Suicide, killing themselves, is not foreign to their repertoire," he said. "So one can also imagine the possibility that they're doing it to themselves in an attempt to create a provocation, to stir up this population."
Angry students later marched out of the schoolyard, shouting an anti- Israeli chant and holding up hand- lettered signs, one of which read, "Stop killing our children!" Some youths hurled stones at Israeli riot police officers, who responded with stun grenades and tear gas. Other villagers pleaded with the officers to pull back so they could calm tempers.
In the aftermath of the attack, feelings were raw in Sur Bahir, which has otherwise remained quiet during the uprising. Villagers complained that the police were slow to respond to the school's report of the suspected bomb, arriving half an hour later, after the explosion.
"The Arab side doesn't concern them, only the Israeli side," said Aziz Abu Teir, a parent, referring to the Israeli authorities.
Mr. Levy denied this, asserting that the call from the school was treated just as if it had come from anywhere else in the city, and that officers were on their way when the bomb went off. However, Mr. Olmert said that if he were the police, he would not give reports of suspected bombs in Arab neighborhoods first priority. "It would be a second priority for obvious reasons," he said. "One hundred percent of attacks are in Jewish neighborhoods."
Mr. Abu Teir said that more such attacks could now be expected. "This cowardly act is going to escalate things," he said of the school bombing. "It's going to be tit for tat. Tomorrow there will be a bomb in a Jewish school."