JERUSALEM — A man concealing an assault rifle and handgun in a box slipped into a cherished Jewish seminary here and opened fire in the library Thursday night, killing eight people in the deadliest attack in Israel in nearly two years.
Witnesses said the assault lasted more than 10 minutes before a seminary student and an off-duty army officer killed the gunman, identified by police as a Palestinian resident of East Jerusalem.
Nine people were wounded in the shooting spree, which felled Orthodox religious scholars at their tables and left trails of blood from the library to a stairwell where some managed to escape. Most of the victims were in their teens and 20s, rescue workers said.
The target of the attack was the Mercaz Harav yeshiva, a Zionist symbol that one rabbi called a "spiritual-ideological power station" allied with the Jewish settlement movement. Settlements are major sources of conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, who want the entire West Bank, along with eastern Jerusalem, for a future state.
"I heard gunshots coming from outside and then the terrorist entered the library," said a young man identifying himself as Yehuda, one of about 80 students trapped in the library with the killer.
"We took cover behind the bookshelves," Yehuda told Israel Radio. "He started shooting. I saw people hit and I ran."
"There were youngsters 16 and 17 years old lying on the floor covered in blood still holding books in their hands," said Yaron Tzuker, a paramedic.
Hezbollah's Al Manar television in Lebanon reported a claim of responsibility for the attack by a previously unknown group, the Martyrs of Imad Mughniyah and Gaza. Mughniyah, a top Hezbollah commander, was killed Feb. 12 by a car bomb in Syria that Hezbollah blamed on Israel.
The Islamic movement Hamas praised the Thursday attack as "heroic" but stopped short of claiming a role in it. In the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, thousands of Palestinians poured into the streets to celebrate, firing rifles in the air. A loudspeaker on a Gaza City street echoed the Hamas message: "This is God's vengeance."
Hamas and other militant groups had vowed retribution for a recent five-day Israeli army incursion against rocket-launching operations in Gaza that left more than 120 people dead, many of them civilians.
Earlier Thursday, an Israeli soldier was killed when militants detonated a bomb near his vehicle as it was patrolling on the Israeli side of the Gaza border. Israeli airstrikes killed five militants in Gaza during the day.
President Bush denounced the shooting in Jerusalem as a "barbaric and vicious attack" and telephoned his condolences to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, the White House said.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, whose U.S.-backed government in the West Bank is holding peace talks with Israel, joined in condemning the shooting.
Israel's Foreign Ministry issued a statement calling on other countries to take a "clear, decisive and uncompromising stand . . . against such terrorism." It said the negotiations aimed at an accord on creating an independent Palestinian state, a top priority of the Bush administration, would not be disrupted.
Police on alert
Police went on high alert and sealed off Jerusalem's entrances after the shooting, which brought the bloodshed of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict back to the city after a lull of more than three years.
The all-male seminary is located in the western, predominantly Jewish part of Jerusalem, which coexists uneasily with eastern Arab neighborhoods that Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East War and later annexed.
Not since Sept. 22, 2004, had militants carried out a fatal attack in Jerusalem.
For Israelis, Thursday's shooting was the deadliest single incident in the conflict since April 17, 2006, when 11 people were killed and more than 60 wounded in a suicide bombing during the Passover holiday in Tel Aviv.
Such attacks killed hundreds of Israelis during a Palestinian uprising in the early part of this decade but declined sharply in recent years as Israel began sealing itself off from the West Bank with walls and fences.
But Jerusalem's Palestinian residents have Israeli ID cards that give them freedom of movement in Israel, unlike Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
Israeli officials still issue frequent "terror alerts" of possible attack on Jerusalem and other cities.
However, Jerusalem Police Chief Aharon Franco said there had been no specific intelligence warning involving the seminary.
Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said the gunman walked unchallenged through the seminary's main gate and into the ground-floor library shortly after 8:30 p.m. He was described as a tall man with short hair wearing faded and torn blue jeans and a jacket-like vest.
