Suicide Bombers Rock Tel Aviv

Two Palestinian suicide bombers blew themselves up in the heart of Tel Aviv's foreign worker neighborhood Wednesday night, killing three other people and injuring 40, Israeli police said.

The Wednesday attacks followed a Palestinian bus ambush Tuesday that killed seven Israelis near the ultra-Orthodox Jewish settlement of Emmanuel in the West Bank Tuesday, ending one month of relative calm in the 21-month-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Tel Aviv police commander Yossi Sedbon said the Wednesday night attack occurred on Neve Shaanan street in the southern part of the downtown area.

"There were two suicide bombers and they are dead," Sedbon told Israeli television. "They carried bags that they detonated. They blew up 15 yards from each other. The explosive charges were not large."

The attack took place between a cafe and a theater in a rundown neighborhood where many foreign workers live. Police said two of the dead were foreign laborers and many of the wounded were from Romania.

Tel Aviv's old central bus station has in recent years become a gathering place for tens of thousands of foreign workers, mainly from Africa, the Phillipines and South America, reports CBS News correspondent Kimberly Dozier.

The neighborhood is crowded with small shops and stalls. One bomb went off near a cafe at the entrance to the Central Theater.

Israel blamed the Palestinian Authority, led by Yasser Arafat.

"The Palestinian Authority continues to do nothing to stop the murderous attacks launched from its territory," said David Baker, an official in the prime minister's office. "This attack in Tel Aviv proves that Palestinian terrorists are determined to murder, maim and terrorize as many Israelis as they can, thinking that by doing so they can pressure Israel into concessions," he told The Associated Press.

And White House spokesman Scott McClellan said of the attack: "This is a despicable act of terrorism which we strongly condemn."

The Lebanese Hizbollah's al-Manar television station reported that the Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad had claimed responsibility for the attacks in a telephone call to the station.

An Israel Radio reporter at the scene said he saw victims' bodies lying on the street.

Dutzu Raduyan, a worker from Romania, said he heard an explosion, and the lights in his nearby apartment went out.

"Moments later we heard the second explosion. I went down" to the street, he said. "It was horrible, dead people were everywhere and the injured were screaming. I've never seen such a thing in my life." Shaken, he said he would take his family back to Romania.

The incident was a blow to Israeli security forces' hopes of ending the bomb attacks. They reoccupied seven of eight Palestinian cities in the West Bank nearly a month ago with the declared aim of stopping suicide bombers from reaching Israel.

It was the first suicide bombing in Israel in a month.

Earlier, Israel had postponed talks with the Palestinians as it buried its dead from the Emmanuel attack, which was claimed by the militant Hamas group and condemned by Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority.

In the West Bank earlier Wednesday, Israeli troops clashed with gunmen presumed to be the Palestinian militants who had mounted the bus ambush.

An Israeli officer and one of the militants were killed in the exchange. Backed by helicopters, troops fanned across West Bank hills in search of the other gunmen behind the attack.

In addition, an Israeli warplane fired a missile into a building in the central Gaza Strip which Palestinians said was a metal foundry and the army said was used by the militant Hamas group to produce mortar rounds and rockets.

The building was flattened in the air strike but there were no reports of casualties.

Israeli forces also killed a militant from the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed group linked to Arafat's Fatah faction, in an exchange of fire in a northern West Bank village, Palestinian and Israeli sources said.

In a refugee camp in the West Bank town of Ramallah, Palestinian medical sources said two Palestinians had been killed and nine wounded in an unexplained explosion. They speculated that a shell or a missile had caused the blast.

Emotions were high in Israel after the bus ambush and angry settlers charged that the government had failed to protect them.

Front-page newspaper reports told how passengers made desperate cellular telephone calls for help while trapped inside the armored bus, halted by a roadside bomb near the ultra-Orthodox Jewish settlement of Emmanuel.

The gunmen, firing through unprotected windows and the roof, sprayed passengers with automatic weapon fire for 15 minutes, survivors said. Most of the dead were settlers.

"There's been a terrorist attack, but I'm all right," the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper quoted Yonatan Gamliel, 16, as saying in a phone call from the bus to his parents. He was shot dead minutes later.

In a nearby hospital, a baby born prematurely to a woman wounded in the ambush died hours after being delivered by emergency surgery.

Inside Emmanuel, mourners dressed in the traditional black garb of devout Jews gathered for a funeral procession and accused the Israeli government of forsaking them.

Some 200,000 Jewish settlers live in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, land Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war and on which Palestinians want to build a state.

The settlers claim a biblical birthright to the region but their communities are widely regarded abroad as illegal and a key obstacle to Israeli-Palestinian peace.

At least 1,447 Palestinians and 558 Israelis have been killed since Palestinians began a revolt in September 2000 shortly after negotiations for a final peace treaty deadlocked.