Bomb explodes on Israeli bus

JERUSALEM: A bomb that Israeli authorities suspect was planted by Palestinian militants exploded in a bus near Tel Aviv yesterday after passengers were evacuated, and police said no one was hurt. “There were about 12 passengers on the bus. The driver stopped immediately when he was alerted to a suspicious object. It was a bag on the back bench, and he immediately ordered everyone off,” Eitan Fixman, a spokesman for the Dan bus company, was quoted as saying on the YNet news site.

Photographs from the scene, in the Tel Aviv suburb of Bat Yam, showed the blast blew out the vehicle’s windows. “It seems that the bomb that exploded on a public bus near Tel Aviv was indeed a terrorist attack,” Ofir Gendelman, a spokesman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said on Twitter. Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said: “We confirm the explosion on the bus today was a terror attack, based on assessments and evidence gathered at the scene.” Police were searching for suspects, he said.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the blast, the first such incident since Israeli-Palestinian peace talks - which have shown few signs of progress - resumed in July. Violence in the West Bank has increased in recent months, and at least 19 Palestinians and four Israelis have been killed in the occupied territory since the negotiations got under way after a three-year break. Rosenfeld said one of its bomb experts was examining the explosive “from a distance” when the bag blew up. He was taken to hospital for observation but was not listed as injured. One of the passengers on the bus had alerted others to the bag, prompting them to leave the bus before the explosion, he said. Israeli media reports said one person was slightly hurt. The last time a bomb exploded on an Israeli bus was in Nov 2012, when 15 people were wounded near the Defence Ministry compound in Tel Aviv. An Israeli Arab pleaded guilty earlier this month to planting the bomb and said it was for political reasons. —Reuters