A suicide mission by Islamic militants near a snack bar mobbed with soldiers killed 19 Israelis and wounded about 60 Sunday with a gruesome new tactic - igniting a small blast and ambushing would-be rescuers with a second major explosion.
The result was a hammer blow to the Israel-PLO peace treaty, already reeling from an unprecedented series of attacks inside Israel.President Ezer Weizman proposed that Israel stop the peace talks for an extended review before expanding Palestinian self-rule into the West Bank. The president has little power but is looked to as an indicator of the national mood in times of crisis.
Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin convened an emergency Cabinet session Sunday evening to determine the government's response.
The first step was a complete closure of the occupied territories, blocking the movement of all Palestinians into Israel. It has been the response after each similar attack and has kept tens of thousands of Palestinians away from jobs in Israel.
The Cabinet also froze any future release of Palestinian prisoners and the opening of a passage between the PLO-ruled areas of Jericho and Gaza.
Rabin underscored the deepening concern about such carnage by making his first personal inspection tour of a suicide bombing site.
"There is no doubt in my mind that this action now is another attempt by the extreme Islamic terror groups to achieve their dual goal of killing Israelis and halting the peace process," he said.
Hecklers at the scene shouted, "How much longer?" while Rabin toured the devastated site surrounded by jittery bodyguards.
Hundreds of Israelis demonstrated in Jerusalem and at the site of the bombing to protest the attack, shouting "Death to Arabs." About 100 police on horseback used water cannon to disperse about 200 demonstrators at a shopping mall near the blast site.
"The peace process is a murder process," said U.S.-born Jack Schwartz.
The radical Islamic Jihad organization issued leaflets in both Gaza and in Damascus, Syria, claiming responsibility for the double-barreled suicide mission.
The Gaza statement said the attack was to avenge the death of Hani Abed, a leader of the military wing whose death was blamed on Israel, and the killing of three Palestinian police shot by Israeli troops earlier this month.
An Islamic Jihad leader said the attack was also to protest Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
"This operation is the genuine retort to the continuous daily expansion of the enemy's settling process in the West Bank and Jerusalem," Fathi Shikaki, secretary-general of the group, said in an interview with Al-Noor radio in Beirut, Lebanon.
The two suicide attackers were identified as Salah Shakr, 25, from Rafah and Anwar Sukar, 23, from Gaza City, whose father is a Palestinian traffic policemen.
Outside Sukar's house, Islamic activists chanted "Death to America and Israel" and said the bomber would be rewarded in paradise. Clearly distraught relatives cried, spat at the Islamic Jihad members and cursed them as "dogs." One threw a flower pot that narrowly missed people in the crowd.
Sukar had been detained briefly by the Palestinian police after the Nov. 11 bicycle bombing by a Islamic Jihad suicide bomber who killed three Israeli officers.
The brunt of the explosion was taken by a single army company, one of a special unit deployed to guard bus stops, especially on Sundays when they are crowded with troops returning from weekend furloughs. Eighteen of the dead were soldiers.
Kit bags, jackets and the red berets of the elite paratrooper unit, many of them bloodstained, lay scattered among the broken glass and other debris after the blast. Victims were groaning and calling for help. Religious medical teams combed the ground and the trees for scattered bits of flesh, since Jewish law requires all body parts to be buried.
"There was a huge explosion. We came outside and saw everything was charred. As I moved toward the snack bar, I saw body parts, heads, arms, a God-awful scene," said eyewitness Haim Hershkovitz.
Bella Zioni, 42, who owns the snack shop, was inside with her husband and son and at first thought she had been knocked to the floor by an electric shock.
"By the time I was able to get up there was another explosion. Again, the entire roof collapsed and the solar panels fell on me," she said from her hospital bed.
The bombs exploded at the Beit Lid junction, also known as the Sharon junction, near the coastal town of Netanya about 9:30 a.m. Named after an Arab village that once stood there, it is 18 miles northeast of Tel Aviv and about six miles from the West Bank.