School bomb blast blamed on Jewish extremists

Five Palestinian pupils were wounded yesterday when a bomb exploded in their school playground.

Five Palestinian pupils were wounded yesterday when a bomb exploded in their school playground. The headmaster, Yousef Abed Rabbo, said he believed Jewish extremists were responsible.

As a military ambulance took the children to a Palestinian hospital, Israeli army sappers defused a second bomb at the school in the West Bank village of Yatta, four miles south of Hebron. About 380 pupils were in the school when the bomb exploded near a water cooler in the playground.

An Israeli police spokesman said the theory that Jewish extremists were involved was being examined, with all other possibilities, including a Palestinian attack. In two previous incidents at Arab schools in East Jerusalem earlier this year, a small device went off in a playground, causing slight injuries, and police caught far-right Jewish activists parking a car bomb outside a girls high school on the Mount of Olives.

In the Gaza town of Khan Yunis yesterday, Israeli troops arrested 23 Palestinian suspects and destroyed nine metal workshops they claimed were manufacturing mortar bombs and rockets. On Monday soldiers manning a Gaza roadblock shot dead a visiting Egyptian civilian who they said threw a grenade at them.

But despite the continued mayhem and the tight controls the Israeli army has maintained on West Bank and Gaza over the Jewish New Year holiday, Israeli diplomats see hopeful signs of a change of tack among the Palestinians as the intifada approaches its second anniversary. They point to last week's revolt by Palestinian legislators, who refused to rubber-stamp Yasser Arafat's new cabinet, and to an open letter by a former minister, Nabil Amer, who accused the Palestinian leader of committing "a serious mistake against our people, authority and dream of establishing our state" by resorting to violence and neglecting to create a civil society.

Shimon Peres, Israel's Foreign Minister, told Israel Radio a breakthrough was possible. Speaking before a meeting in New York with representatives of the international peace-seeking "quartet" – the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations – Mr Peres said: "If we see that there is a change in the situation, we shall welcome it." The quartet was also meeting Palestinian officials and a delegation from Arab states. But the Palestinian Planning minister, Nabil Shaath, complained that not all the four mediators were backing a European blueprint to end the bloodshed.

An Israeli diplomat said both the quartet and Israel were now "speaking the same language". He added: "We don't know how far and how fast things will move. We can't be certain that the next Palestinian leadership will be any more convenient for us, but if the reforms go ahead it should be possible to go again to negotiations."

* Two decades after Israel's Lebanese allies tried to slaughter them in Beirut refugee camps, survivors of the Sabra and Chatila massacres say the world has given Ariel Sharon a licence to kill by forgetting their ordeal.

They say the Israeli Prime Minister – the architect of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon during which the massacres took place – learnt that Palestinians can be killed with impunity. "There'll be a massacre every day," said Maher Srour, 35, who saw members of the Israeli-backed Christian Lebanese Forces militia shoot his infant sister during the massacre, in which his father and several siblings were also killed.