Shocked Israelis start burying victims

Beit Shean victims: Israel is in grim mood

Grieving relatives have started burying the victims of Thursday's attacks which killed nine Israelis.

The bodies of two brothers - Dvir Anter, 14, and Noy, 12 - arrived back in the northern West Bank settlement of Ariel on Friday. Their funeral is due to take place on Sunday.

The brothers and a 61-year-old Israeli man died in the Mombasa suicide bombing which also killed nine Kenyans.

The Israeli brothers killed in Mombasa (photo: Haaretz newspaper)

Some of the six victims of an attack in Israel itself were buried in the northern Israeli town of Beit Shean.

Two Palestinian gunmen opened fire on a Likud party office and a bus station in Beit Shean on Thursday, killing four Israelis before being shot dead themselves. Two more Israelis died later in hospital.

In retaliation Israeli troops on Friday demolished the two attackers' family homes in the West Bank city of Jenin.

Israeli Air Force transport planes airlifted 258 Israelis home from Kenya, including 22 wounded who were rushed to local hospitals.

The father of the two boys killed, Rami Anter, told the Israeli daily Maariv that they had gone "to look for calm far from the intifada (Palestinian uprising), to take the children on safari, but I brought back their little bodies to put them in the ground".

His wife, Ora, was seriously wounded in the blast. She is reported to be still unconscious in an Israeli hospital. Their youngest daughter, Edva, was also wounded.

The Anter family is devastated

As the car bomb blew up the Paradise Hotel in Mombasa the 261 Israeli holidaymakers aboard an Arkia charter plane had a narrow escape when two missiles targeted it just after take-off.

"I don't want to travel abroad for now," said Mombasa bomb survivor Ayelet Rubabshi, 14, from her hospital bed in Jerusalem. "If I am attacked, I prefer that it be close to home."

At the Anter boys' school in Ariel the walls were plastered with photos of the boys and drawings in their memory, alongside newspaper articles about the bombing.

"All the students are in shock," school director Ilana Nulman told the French news agency AFP.

The Mombasa suicide bombing was claimed by the previously unknown Army of Palestine.

But it is widely suspected to have been the work of Osama Bin Laden's al-Qaeda network.