ARABS-ISRAEL - Sept. 9 - First Suicide Attack By An Arab Citizen.

Six Israelis are killed and dozens are wounded in three separate attacks, the most lethal of which is a suicide bombing carried out for the first time by an Arab citizen of Israel, who blows himself up killing three Jews and wounding dozens at the train station in the northern city of Nahariya, near the Lebanese border. The blast occurs after the train from Tel Aviv and Haifa has pulled into the depot, when the platform is crowded with soldiers and civilians. Israeli authorities identified the bomber as Mohammed Shakur Habeishi, 48, a man with two wives and six children from an Arab town in northern Israel. He went to the West Bank city of Jenin, where he collected explosives, apparently from contacts in Hamas, which on Sept. 10 claimed responsibility for the bombing.

(Habashi is the first suicide bomber from Israel's million-member Arab minority. His attack proves that Hamas can strike deep inside Israel. In a videotape distributed by Hamas and played on Israeli TV stations, Habashi was shown reading a statement that he would carry out the bombing to exact revenge "for all the Palestinians killed since 1948". Israeli security officials say ties have been growing in recent months between the Israeli Arabs and the Islamic militant groups in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Habashi was a member of the Islamic Movement, a legal political organisation in Israel. Several politicians demanded on Sept. 10 that the Islamic Movement be outlawed. However, senior officials in the movement condemned the bombing and said Habashi did not represent their views).

The bombing follows a drive-by shooting early in the morning in the Jordan Valley Road, where at least one gunman in a van with Palestinian licence plates opened fire on a minibus carrying teachers to a Jewish school in Israeli-occupied territory. Two Israelis were killed, one of them a 24-year-old kindergarten teacher and the other the 42-year-old driver. After the Nahariya bombing, a bomb exploded in a car in Beit Lid, east of the coastal resort of Netanya. The bomber, Abdel Fatah Owadeh, a 32-year-old Palestinian police officer from the West Bank village of Irtakh, detonated his charge next to a bus, perhaps thinking that would wreak the most carnage. But the bus was empty and the bomber managed to kill only himself. Three Israelis sustained minor injuries. After the bombings, Israeli Arabs and their political leaders claimed that no underground terrorist movement had taken root among Israeli Arabs. The government spokesmen agreed, although they called the Nahariya suicide attack cause for alarm and accused the PA of inciting Arab citizens of Israel to violence. PM Sharon spokesman Raanan Gissin said: "This is no cause for major paranoia, but it is a cause for alarm and a cause for alertness. It's not just the guns that kill but the words as well". Israel responded to the attacks by firing anti-tank missiles from helicopter gunships at five Palestinian targets, most of them the headquarters of security agencies loyal to Arafat.