Israel Mourns Eight Slain Students Thousands Attend Service for Victims of Gunman Described As Despondent Over Gaza

Israel Mourns Eight Slain Students Thousands Attend Service for Victims of Gunman Described as Despondent Over Gaza

By Griff Witte Washington Post Foreign Service Saturday, March 8, 2008; A09

JERUSALEM, March 7 -- The mourners came in the thousands, sobbing and swaying in prayer as the bodies of eight rabbinical students were laid upon a set of long, wooden benches.

Just hours earlier, the students had been sitting on benches as they studied sacred Jewish texts. But a gunman's rampage Thursday night, the first major attack on civilians here in four years, left them dead on the library floor and this city traumatized.

"The murderer did not wish to target them specifically," said Jerusalem's mayor, Uri Lupolianski, "but rather each and every one of us, each and every resident of the holy city of Jerusalem."

As Lupolianski spoke, a different mourning ceremony unfolded on the other side of the city. The Palestinian gunman, killed by an off-duty army officer's bullet, had lived in East Jerusalem.

At the family's middle-class hillside home, the green flags of the radical Islamic movement Hamas fluttered above more than 100 friends and relatives seated somberly on a backyard patio.

Hamas, which advocates the destruction of Israel and controls the Gaza Strip, immediately praised the attack at the Mercaz HaRav yeshiva, and on Friday a spokesman asserted responsibility for it on behalf of the group before backtracking and saying that the announcement had been premature.

The seminary, one of the most famous in Jerusalem, is considered the ideological heart of the religious Zionist movement, inspiring Jewish settlement of the West Bank and, before Israel withdrew its soldiers and settlers in 2005, the Gaza Strip. Palestinians in both territories are fenced off from Jewish areas, a measure deemed necessary by the government to protect Israel and the settlements. But the fact that the gunman came from East Jerusalem, an area largely on the Israeli side of the barrier, demonstrated that Israel's security dilemma is hardly limited to the occupied territories.

Through war and peace over more than four decades, Israel has fought to keep Jerusalem undivided, even while its population has remained relatively segregated, with a predominantly Arab east and a Jewish west. The result, security analysts said Friday, is that Israel is vulnerable if a Palestinian decides to cross town to attack a Jewish target.

"The arrangement in East Jerusalem is one of the weak points in the alignment against terrorism," said Mark Heller, director of research at Israel's Institute for National Security Studies. "Arab residents of East Jerusalem have identity cards and can travel about freely. I don't know what, if anything, can be done about that without tampering with the entire system."

Heller said Israeli policymakers assumed that Palestinians in East Jerusalem would be less likely to carry out attacks because they enjoyed many of the privileges of living in Israel, unlike their counterparts in the West Bank and Gaza.

But Ghassan Khatib, a professor at the West Bank's Bir Zeit University, said Thursday's attack was evidence that Palestinians everywhere are losing faith in the faltering U.S.-backed peace process and are resorting to violence.

"Security measures can never bring an end to the conflict," he said. "The only thing that will is a political solution that takes into account the rights and interests of both sides."

A day after the attack, security was tight across Jerusalem, with police bearing automatic weapons standing on many street corners and a surveillance blimp hovering overhead. Israel also imposed a strict curfew in the West Bank and restricted access to Muslims wishing to pray at al-Aqsa mosque in the Old City, Islam's third-holiest site.

At the home of Ala Abu Dheim, the 25-year-old man who walked into the yeshiva Thursday night with an AK-47 assault rifle hidden in a box, family members said that nine relatives had been taken into custody for questioning overnight.

Abu Dheim was a bus driver who worked with Jews and spoke Hebrew, family members said Friday. With his green eyes and fair skin, he mixed relatively easily in Israeli society. He was engaged to be married this summer, but relatives said he had become despondent over a recent Israeli offensive in Gaza that killed more than 120 Palestinians, many of them civilians.

"The situation has changed because of what happened in Gaza," said a relative who identified himself as Abu Abdullah. "Whether an Arab is in Gaza or Jerusalem, it is the same attitude."

Israel says its military operations in Gaza are aimed at stopping Hamas from firing rockets into southern Israel. Mourners at the yeshiva memorial service Friday were instructed not to indulge any desire for retribution.

"Revenge is from on high," said Yaakov Shapira, the yeshiva's head rabbi.

Weeping openly, Shapira called for prayers for the relatives of the victims, who ranged in age from 15 to 26. "Today, we are all in need of mercy, the entire country," Shapira said. "Pray for all of us, and for the parents and the brothers and sisters and all the friends who are in such pain."

The service was attended by a diverse array of Israelis -- ultra-Orthodox men in tall black hats, secular Jews in jeans and soldiers in uniform. Students gazed out from the school's windows and balconies onto the massive crowd below.

Rabbi Yerachmiel Weiss, a leader of the yeshiva, paid tribute to the dead students, one by one, saying he wanted to "explain to you, Creator of the World, who you took."

"Each one loved to sit in the library here," he said, "and now you have taken them to your library on high."

Special correspondent Hillary Zaken contributed to this report.

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