Reuters
July 31, 2001
By Dominic Evans

NABLUS, West Bank, July 31 (Reuters) -- Medical teams combing through the debris of an Israeli strike against leading Palestinian militants on Tuesday had to use tweezers to collect the tiny fragments of their flesh and bones.

Eight people died in the attack on the Nablus headquarters of the militant Islamic movement Hamas, including two senior Hamas members, a local journalist, a Hamas bodyguard and two young boys passing by the building.

Witnesses described the attack as a missile strike and some said projectiles were fired from an Israeli helicopter.

Doctors said the force of the blast -- one of the deadliest Israeli attacks since the start of the Palestinian uprising 10 months ago -- blew the heads right off two men.

The bodies of others were charred black from the explosion and some had limbs blown off.

"This is a criminal massacre," Nablus governor Mahmoud Aloul said as he picked his way through blood-strewn rubble of the third-floor apartment where senior Hamas official Jamal Mansour ran his Palestinian Centre for Studies and Media.

Israel said the killing of Mansour, his colleague Jamal Salim and their associates was intended "to prevent acts of murder...against Israeli civilians." It expressed its regret over the deaths of two boys.

The strike was the latest in a series of Israeli killings which Palestinians condemn as cold-blooded assassinations.

Local journalist Mohammad Beshawi, 26, and Othman Qatanani, a 24-year-old employee at Mansour's office, were also killed, alongside bodyguard Omar Mansour, 28.

"They were just talking, in an ordinary civilian apartment," Aloul told Reuters.

Rubble nearly a foot (25 cm) deep covered parts of the floor of the three-room apartment where medics collected teeth and bits of jawbone in small plastic bags. Blood and flecks of flesh stained parts of the walls.

One medic rushed to a waiting ambulance to hand over a piece of brain, wrapped in white paper, which he said could help save one of the injured.

Twisted metal furniture, a broken fan and a wrecked fax machine lay in the piles of shattered concrete.

Parents of Dead Boys Traumatised

At Nablus Ittihad Hospital, where six bodies and at least seven wounded people were taken, fearful relatives gathered.

On the fourth floor of the hospital, the parents of schoolboys Bilal and Ashraf Khalil -- aged 10 and eight -- were being treated for shock after hearing their two sons had died.

The boys had left their mother while she was visiting a nearby health centre. They were walking past Mansour's office block when they were hit by the blast, a family friend said.

One woman wept quiet tears of relief when she heard none of her family were among the dead. A few metres (yards) away, five veiled women broke out crying and beating their heads in grief when told of the fatalities.

One hospital official said the nature of the injuries, mainly to the head and upper body, suggested the dead men were sitting down when the rockets or missiles slammed through the office windows.

"They should be taken to The Hague and tried," hospital director Samir Ridda said of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's government.

Minutes after the blast echoed around Nablus around 2,000 people streamed into the centre of the northern West Bank town.

Some fired shots in the air, chanting "Allah Akbar" (God is greater), "With our blood and our souls, we redeem you, O martyrs," and demanded vengeance.

Israel has a policy of killing Palestinians it says are involved in attacks against its citizens. A statement issued by Sharon confirmed the army had carried out the strike but did not say whether it was by land or air.

The Palestinian Authority declared two days of mourning and Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin warned Israel would pay a heavy price.

"Revenge, revenge, al-Qassam brigades!" the Nablus crowd called, invoking the Hamas military wing which has killed scores of Israelis in suicide bombings in recent years and mounted a bombing campaign inside the Jewish state since a 10-month-old revolt against Israeli occupation broke out.

At least 508 Palestinians, 130 Israelis and 13 Israeli Arabs have been killed since the Palestinian uprising against Israel's occupation flared in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.