Answering Sharon

AS ARAB leaders gathered in Amman for a summit called expressly to support the Palestinian intifada, the intifada raged on -- in the ugliest, most violent forms, reports Graham Usher from Jerusalem. Two bombs exploded in West and East Jerusalem on Tuesday followed by another three the next day in the Israeli towns of Kfar Saba, Netanya and Peta Tikva, the last two defused. The toll was four dead and injury to 40 civilians, four of them seriously. Two of the slain were Palestinian suicide bombers from the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas.
The blasts came after -- and may have been a response to -- a night of near war in Hebron, the partitioned West Bank town where 400 Jewish settlers (and the 3,000 Israeli soldiers on hand to protect them) contra-exist amid 120,000 Palestinians. On Monday a Palestinian gunman shot dead 10-month old Shalhevet Pass and wounded her father Yitzak, a well-known settler activist in the city.
Outraged by the killing the army pumped machine-gun fire and tank shells into the densely populated Palestinian neighbourhood of Abu Sneineh whence the shots had come, while settlers called on the government to "recapture" the Palestinian-controlled territory since "terrorists must be wiped out".
For a few terrifying hours it seemed the army might take the settlers at their word. That night it called on the 15,000 Palestinians in Abu Sneineh to evacuate their homes and brought in tanks and soldiers to the centre and outskirts of the area. But mindful perhaps that a partial Israeli reoccupation would not help the "moderates" at the Arab summit the army stayed put, and so did the Palestinians.
Seething with anger, the settlers exacted their own revenge, torching seven Palestinian homes in Abu Sneineh, vandalising Palestinian cars and destroying an office of the Islamic Trust in Hebron. The shelling and settler attacks left 16 Palestinians injured, including a three-year old boy.
The violence generated more, as it tends to in the occupied territories. On Tuesday morning a car bomb erupted in the West Jerusalem commercial area of Talpiot, leaving five Israeli civilians injured, all lightly. It was followed six hours later by another, more lethal explosion, rocking the French Hill Jewish settlement in occupied East Jerusalem, leaving the suicide bomber dead and 32 injured, most of them passengers from an Israeli bus.
But the worst assault came on Wednesday, near a petrol station between Kfar Saba west of the Green Line and the Palestinian town of Qalqiliya to the east. According to one eyewitness, the bomber walked into a group of teenagers waiting for a school bus and then blew himself up, leaving two and himself dead.
The Islamic Jihad movement claimed the Talpiot blast, in retaliation "for the crimes committed by the Zionist enemy against Palestinian families in Hebron". Hamas' military arm, Izzadin Al-Qassem, took "full responsibility" for the French Hill and Kfar Saba hits, warning "there are still seven martyrs ready to strike and we have more".
But Israeli leader Ariel Sharon had little time for the Islamists. In a statement from his office on Tuesday he simply "emphasised" that the "perpetrators of acts of terror will not escape punishment" and that "Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority will bear the consequences". As for when and how the consequences will come, "wait and see", he said.
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