beersheva | Funeral followed funeral of the victims of the double suicide bombings on buses in the city’s center.
Aviel Atash, 3, didn’t walk into his classroom on the first day of school on Wednesday, Sept. 1, as he had planned.
Instead his father, relatives and family friends walked the remains of his small body on a stretcher through the Beersheva cemetery chanting prayers of mourning.
Unwilling to let him go, those grieving touched him, moving their hands from the small black cloth covering him to their lips.
“Aviel, Aviel,” they cried out.
“Where have you gone?” his grandfather asked. “He was a good boy, he played with me,” said as he stood by the grave.
The father cut his shirt in mourning for his only son and said Kaddish.
Speaking to the group, the city mayor said that Aviel’s mother, who herself is wounded and lying in the hospital, never imagined when they left their home that they were embarking on his last journey.
The bus exploded when they were on their way home. The boy’s mother learned only the next day that Aviel was among the 16 killed in this Negev city of some 200,000.
Government minister Ehud Olmert said, “What do you say about a boy who is almost 4 who is already a victim of terror. What do you say about those who are sending these bombs to hurt Aviel and his mother, Rachel?
“They did not know them, they did not meet them, they only know that they are Jews living in this land,” said Olmert.
“Yesterday a bus exploded in Beersheva, before that it was in Jerusalem, and who knows where else this might happen,” he said.
“I want to promise you that this will never happen again,” Olmert added.
“But as long as there are murderers that want to kill us, there is a danger that it can happen again.”
“There is nothing these murderers want more than to see us scared and losing faith,” said Olmert.
He added that the government is doing the best it can and has done it’s utmost to prevent these type of attacks.
The other victims included Tatiana Korchesko, Denise Hadad, Rosa Lehman, Emmanuel Yosepov, Karine Malka, Shoshana Amos, Tamara Dibrashvilli, Tekele Tiroyaient, Margareta Sokolov, Larisa Gomanenko, Vitaly Brodsky, Eliyahu Ozan and Roman Sokolovsky.
The militant Islamic group Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack.
Ra’anan Gissin, a senior aide to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, pointed to neighboring Syria, saying Hamas leaders are permitted to work out of the Syrian capital, Damascus.
“The fact that Hamas is operating from Syria will not grant it immunity,” Gissin said. Last year Israel attacked targets in Syria after a Palestinian bombing.
Israeli security sources said earlier that Sharon and his military commanders had decided to stage more strikes to eliminate militant Palestinian leaders in response to the bus attack.
The twin bombings in Beersheva shattered hopes in Israel that the period of suicide attacks — more than 100 in four years — was over. “The nightmare is back,” the newspaper Yediot Achronot said Wednesday, Sept. 1, in its main headline above a photo of a burning bus.
The last suicide attack was in March, and many Israelis believed the militants had been defeated, or at least suffered a serious blow.
Israeli leaders had boasted of increasingly effective means in fighting bombers, including a large network of Palestinian informers, mass arrests and an expanding barrier to separate Israel from the West Bank. Sharon pledged Sept. 1 to speed up construction of the barrier.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.