8 killed in Jerusalem shootout; Hamas owns attack
Middle East Desk Report

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 told Reuters 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.
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 U.S.-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.
Thousands gathered Friday outside a bullet-scarred Jewish seminary in Jerusalem to mourn eight students killed by a suspected Palestinian gunman. Hamas militants in Gaza claimed responsibility for the attack. A Hamas radio presenter said the group’s military wing had “promised a jolting response” to an Israeli offensive against Gaza militants which Palestinian officials say killed more than 120. The radio called on believers to “celebrate this victory against the brutal enemy.” Thursday’s shooting was the first major attack in Jerusalem in four years and the deadliest in Israel since a suicide bomber killed 11 people in Tel Aviv on April 17, 2006.
Thousands of Israelis gathered outside a bullet-scarred Jerusalem rabbinical seminary on Friday to mourn eight students killed by a suspected Palestinian gunman, while an Israeli official said the country would not suspend peace talks. A bearded rabbi recited Hebrew psalms line by line, the crowd repeating after him, in memory of the dead, one of whom was 26 and the rest between ages 15 and 19. People packed nearby balconies to observe the ceremony, after which the bodies were to be taken for burial.