- JERUSALEM (Reuters) - The
20-year-old Palestinian suicide bomber must have blended into the crowd
of teenagers he joined waiting for a table at the Moment Cafe in a quiet
residential area of Jerusalem on Saturday night.
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- Moments after Fouad Hurani walked into the queue outside
the cafe, he detonated a bomb strapped to the body, killing himself and
at least 11 other people in the blast.
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- When the smoke cleared, the cafe floor was covered with
body parts, pools of blood and hundreds of nails and metal screws Hurani
had packed into his bomb for deadly effect.
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- One of the patrons telephoned Israeli television seconds
after the blast, his words obscured by the sounds of screams and groaning
from the wounded.
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- "A man walked in and blew himself up. There are
pieces of him all over the place," the man told Israeli television.
"It's the most horrible thing I've ever seen."
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- The floor of the cafe was red from blood.
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- More than 50 people were taken by medics to hospital,
many hit by metal shrapnel.
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- "Some people were sitting on chairs, lifeless. Others
were lying on the ground," said Shlomi Yonatan, who was in an adjacent
pizzeria when the bomb went off and rushed into the cafe to see a scene
he said would haunt him for the rest of his life.
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- "The body at the entrance must have been the bomber
-- he was a kid...His entire body was ripped up and all I saw was the head,"
Yonatan said.
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- The militant Islamic group Hamas said it was behind the
bombing. It has carried out scores of attacks since interim peace deals
between Israel and the Palestinians were signed in 1993.
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- CIVILIAN TARGETS
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- Palestinian militants have stepped up suicide bombings
since a 17-month-old uprising against occupation began, carrying out a
wave of what they call revenge attacks that have targeted Israeli civilians
in buses, restaurants, crowded streets.
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- Like many of the other patrons, Esther Brightburg, 17,
went to the Moment cafe because she thought suicide bombers would never
think to target establishments in Jerusalem's quiet residential neighborhoods.
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- But she took the attack as a sign that bombers were looking
for crowds elsewhere in a city whose central cafe district has been largely
deserted after a string of attacks, including one in December in which
11 people were killed.
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- Last week a bomber from the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades,
an armed group affiliated with President Yasser Arafat faction, killed
10 people waiting outside a synagogue in an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood
of Jerusalem.
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- Eran, who was in the Moment cafe when the bomber struck,
described the explosion as "simply atomic."
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- "The whole place filled with smoke and there was
a caustic smell of gunpowder. You don't want to know. People started screaming,
going wild. I had never seen anything like it," he said.
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- It was the not the first time a bomber had tried to attack
an area of Jerusalem that had previously escaped the violence.
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- On Thursday, a waiter disarmed a bomber trying to enter
a cafe in a trendy shopping district of Jerusalem that had also never been
hit by suicide attacks.
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