Real History, Explosions, and Israel

Jewish
Settlers Confess to Bomb Plot, Says Lawyer

JERUSALEM (Reuters) –
Two Jewish settlers arrested on suspicion of trying to plant a bomb on the main street of a neighborhood in Arab East Jerusalem have confessed to the charge, their lawyer said
Tuesday.

“Under interrogation they admitted their part in the incident during which they were caught,” Naftali
Wuerzberger told Israel’s Channel Ten television.

Shlomo Dvir and
Yarden Morag, both from a Jewish settlement near Hebron in the West Bank, were arrested in A-Tur on
March 28 after they parked between the
Palestinian neighborhood’s Mukasad hospital and its girls’ school. They tried to detach a trailer in which they had hidden a powerful bomb, police said.

Israeli television footage of the alleged device showed gas canisters and fuel barrels laid out on the floor of the trailer.

Four other
settlers were later arrested for
suspected complicity. Wuerzberger, who
said he had been denied access to his
clients until this week, denied the men
constituted an organized “Jewish
underground.”

“This was an operation in the style of
‘Hasamba’,” he said, alluding to a series of Israeli adventure books for children.
“Its intent was albeit grievous but in the end of the day it was a very amateurish business.”

Israeli-Arab legislator Ahmed
Tibi called the case “a dangerous development.”

He accused police of not doing enough to catch the killers of eight
Palestinians, who he said were shot by
Jewish militants in the West Bank during a
Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation over the last 19 months.

In another attack closer to A-Tur, seven teachers and a teacher were hurt when unknown assailants bombed an Arab school on the outskirts of Jerusalem on
March 5.

Israel’s deputy internal security minister, Gideon Ezra, said that if the alleged A-Tur bomb plot succeeded, it would have led to an escalation of
Palestinian militant attacks which have already killed scores of Israelis during the revolt.