Leaders mull response to suicide bombing

JERUSALEM -- Israeli police foiled an attack on an army base Sunday as the country's leaders considered their response to a new level of Palestinian attacks: a suicide bombing in a Jewish settlement, the destruction of an Israeli tank and a rocket fired at Israel.

After sunset, police stopped a suspicious car at the entrance to an army training base near Hadera, six miles from the West Bank. Police said one of its two occupants started shooting, and they returned fire.

One of the assailants was shot and killed, said police commander Yaakov Raz. The other tried to escape in the car, but "saw he could not get through a roadblock and set off a bomb he was carrying, killing himself." Six people were wounded, including three policemen.

West Bank leaders of the Al Aqsa Brigades, a militia affiliated with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, said the group planned the attack. They said Mohammed Hmuda, 18, planned to detonate explosives on the base, while 22-year-old Abdeljaber Khaled, was to spray the camp with bullets from his rifle.

Earlier Sunday, Israeli helicopters fired missiles that hit three buildings in the West Bank city of Nablus -- a police command post, a government complex and an apartment meant as an office for Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

Reaction to attack

Reacting to the attack on the army base, a spokesman for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Raanan Gissin, said Israel would not escalate the violence with Palestinians but that "the terrorists will find out that we have more ways to reach them than what have been conducted up to now."

Sharon convened his security Cabinet to consider further Israeli steps. No decisions were announced, but Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer told the Cabinet that Israel would "increase the military pressure on the perpetrators of terrorism," according to a statement.

Six Israelis have died in three attacks in recent days.

A suicide bomber killed two teen-agers when he blew himself up at a pizzeria in a shopping center in the West Bank settlement of Karnei Shomron on Saturday, two days after Palestinians blew apart a tank in the Gaza Strip.