Suicide Bomber Kills 5 Aboard Bus in the Heart of Tel Aviv
It was the second suicide attack in Israel in two days. On Wednesday, in the first suicide blast in more than six weeks, a Palestinian blew himself up at a bus stop near Umm al Fahm, in northern Israel, killing an Israeli policeman.

In a statement on its Internet site, the militant group Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for Wednesday's bombing, Reuters reported. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for today's explosion.

Today's bombing was condemned by the Palestinian Authority, which denounced all attacks on Palestinian or Israeli civilians.

The attack in Tel Aviv, it said in a statement, "and all other attacks against civilians," go against the national interests of the Palestinians and give Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel and his army a "sufficient pretext to kill and to suppress."

The authority has repeatedly condemned suicide attacks and has vowed to punish the perpetrators, but militant groups have continued attacks in the two-year-old uprising against Israeli occupation.

A spokesman for the radical Islamic group Hamas predicted a new wave of bombings in Israel.

"The martyr operations will continue against the Zionists; we are defending our people," the spokesman, Abdel Aziz Rantissi, said, "The resistance will escalate."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/19/international/middleeast/19CND-ISRA.html