Gunman Kills Eight at Seminary in Jerusalem
Attack Could Strain Already Faltering Peace Negotiations

By Griff Witte
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, March 7, 2008

JERUSALEM, March 6 -- A gunman walked into a prominent Jewish seminary in Jerusalem on Thursday evening and opened fire on students as they read in the library, killing eight and wounding nine in one of the deadliest attacks on Israeli civilians in years.

Witnesses said students at the Mercaz HaRav yeshiva, a stone and glass structure set on a quiet residential street, initially thought the noise of gunshots was from firecrackers set off to celebrate the first day of Adar, a month for rejoicing in the Jewish calendar.

The attacker fired dozens, perhaps hundreds of rounds, witnesses said, before he was killed by an Israeli army officer who rushed into the school after hearing the shots.

The attack was likely to further strain a faltering U.S.-backed peace process, days after more than 120 Palestinians, many of them civilians, were killed during an Israeli offensive in the Gaza Strip. President Bush has encouraged the two sides to reach a peace agreement by the end of his term in office; Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited the region this week in an effort to keep the talks on track.

A television station operated by Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite movement backed by Syria, said a previously unknown group asserted responsibility for the attack. The group is named in part for Imad Mughniyah, a Hezbollah leader killed in Damascus last month in a car bombing the group blamed on Israel, a charge Israeli officials denied.

Hamas, the radical Islamic movement that controls Gaza, praised the attack. "It was a natural response to Israeli crimes in Gaza," the organization said in a statement. "We bless this act. It won't be the last one." Thousands of Palestinians in Gaza City celebrated in the streets, firing guns into the air in jubilation, as word began to spread.

Israel blamed the assault on Islamic extremist groups, saying that the same people responsible for firing rockets toward Israeli towns bordering Gaza were also to blame for Thursday night's killings.

"Tonight's massacre is a defining moment," said Mark Regev, spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. "The people celebrating have exposed themselves for what they really are: hateful extremists."

Bush called Olmert to express his condolences and issued a statement saying that "this barbaric and vicious attack on innocent civilians deserves the condemnation of every nation."

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, Israel's partner in peace talks, also condemned the killings.

Israeli media quoted security sources as saying they believed the gunman was a young Palestinian man who lived in East Jerusalem. The area, occupied by the Jewish state in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, is on Israel's side of the barrier it is constructing between Israel and the West Bank.

Mercaz HaRav is considered a wellspring of religious Zionism, the movement that has motivated many Jews to settle the West Bank following Israel's seizure of Palestinian territories in 1967. Israel withdrew its soldiers and settlers from Gaza in 2005.

Police chief Aharon Franco said that at about 8:30 p.m., the shooter walked into the seminary with an AK-47 assault rifle hidden in a box.

The eight people killed were rabbinical students in their late teens or 20s, police said.

"This terrorist attack is a severe blow, after which no state can remain silent," said Zvi Katzover, a settler leader and graduate of the seminary, which has about 700 students and is in the western Jerusalem neighborhood of Kiryat Moshe.

"The government has to immediately stop building the terrorist state," he said, referring to the Palestinian Authority, "and has to enable the establishment of new settlements and expand the existing ones."

The attack was reminiscent of an earlier instance of a gunman killing people at prayer: In 1994, Israeli settler Baruch Goldstein shot dead 29 Palestinians at the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron before he himself was killed.

Outside the seminary Thursday night, hundreds of ultra-orthodox Israelis chanted "Death to the Arabs!" as Israeli forces conducted a room-to-room search of the building, looking for other perpetrators after rumors circulated that the gunman had not acted alone. Police later determined he probably had.

Also outside the seminary were nervous parents, furiously trying to reach their sons by cellphone.

Moshe Harel said his 15-year-old son was inside the school at the time of the attack, but was not hurt. "My wife called and told me something was going on at the yeshiva," Harel said. "It took half an hour before I could get ahold of him. It was terrifying."

But Harel was not surprised by what happened. "It's a long war," he said. "It didn't start today. It won't end tomorrow."

Others said the attack was proof that Israel needs to act to defend itself, even if it does so reluctantly.

"If they didn't attack us, we wouldn't attack them back," said Chaim Schur, a 19-year-old rabbinical student who stood across the street from the seminary Thursday night, watching paramedics dashing in and out. "We just want to stop. We don't want to go on killing kids in Gaza. It's not our fault."

The attack shook residents of Jerusalem, which has not experienced an attack of similar magnitude since 2004. Within minutes of Thursday's killings, people who had been out at restaurants and bars began anxiously huddling around television sets and radios to get the latest news.

The deadliest attack in Israel in recent years was in April 2006, when 11 people were killed in a suicide strike at a falafel stand in Tel Aviv.

Thursday's attack came on the same day that an Israeli soldier was killed during operations on the border with Gaza. An Israeli strike Thursday night in Gaza killed four members of Islamic Jihad, the group that asserted responsibility for killing the soldier.

Special correspondents Samuel Sockol and Hillary Zaken in Jerusalem and Islam Abdulkarim in Gaza City, and staff researcher Robert E. Thomason in Washington contributed to this report.