Fortifying Jerusalem

After a wave of shootings and bombings in Jerusalem, Israel has approved a plan that could turn the city into a fortress, reports CBS News Correspondent Robert Berger.

The controversial plan includes building walls along municipal boundaries to try to stop terrorists from infiltrating Jerusalem from the West Bank. There will be tighter security between Arab East Jerusalem and Jewish West Jerusalem, including roadblocks and more police patrols. Analysts say it turns the city into an armed fortress and destroys the Israeli myth of a united Jerusalem.

A Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up next to two agents of Israel's Shin Bet security service near an Arab town in central Israel on Wednesday.

An official from Palestinian President Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction said the bomber had worked for Israeli intelligence but had turned on his handlers to carry out his "national duty."

Palestinian security sources said collaborators regularly meet with Israeli security agents in that area. Israel's security forces have a wide network of Palestinian collaborators who provide intelligence.

Palestinian security sources named a woman on Tuesday whose identity had been a mystery since she died carrying out a bombing in Jerusalem on Sunday, killing an elderly Israeli and wounded dozens of people.

The sources said Wafa Idres was a 27- or 28-year-old divorced paramedic from the Al-Amari refugee camp near Ramallah, in the West Bank. Residents of Al-Amari confirmed the identification.

Idres had no known links to Palestinian factions, the security sources told Reuters.

An Israeli police spokesman had no immediate comment, saying police were investigating independently.

It is still unclear whether the woman who carried out Sunday's bombing on Jerusalem's bustling Jaffa Road detonated the bomb herself or was killed by a faulty fuse. If the former, she would be the first Palestinian woman suicide bomber.

The Jerusalem security plan is expected to cost $25 million, which Public Security Minister Uzi Landau said aimed to "provide a kind of barrier between Jerusalem and the Arab congestion around it.

"It does not mean fences and walls inside Jerusalem, as some try to present it," he added.

Israel regards Jerusalem as its eternal, indivisible capital. The Palestinians want East Jerusalem as the capital of an independent state.

Any division would also pose logistical complications, since Israel has built Jewish neighborhoods all around the eastern sector, where about 200,000 Jews live — a number about equal to the city's Palesinian population. Creating a clean dividing line would be virtually impossible.

Israel annexed East Jerusalem in the 1967 Middle East war in a move not recognized internationally.

The Palestinians said any plan for physical barriers to divide Arab East Jerusalem and the Jewish western part would fuel tensions in 16 months of Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

"Those who won't be able to come into Jerusalem are those who want peace. Those who want to come in and blow themselves up will always find a way in," Ziad Abu Zayyad, the Palestinian Minister of State for Jerusalem Affairs, told Army Radio.

The Israeli government is under public pressure to tighten security after a surge in violence in the uprising against Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The Jewish state has sent troops into Palestinian areas to round up militants, saying President Yasser Arafat is doing too little to crack down. He says army blockades in Palestinian areas prevent him doing so.

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