A Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up on Israel's frontier with the West Bank yesterday, shortly after Israel angered the Palestinians by starting work on a security fence between the two territories.
The physical barrier is meant to keep out suicide bombers.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said it was too early to talk about Palestinian statehood on the West Bank side of the line.
Sharon's remarks appeared to caution US President George W. Bush against siding with a proposal to declare a provisional Palestinian state as part of a vision of Middle East peace which Bush is expected to unveil this week.
The Palestinian bomber killed only himself when he triggered explosives near an Israeli border police unit on Israel's side of the frontier north of the Palestinian city of Tulkarm.
Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said the man was one of five would-be suicide bombers being sought by security forces. Israel says the security fence, inaugurated on Sunday, is intended purely to prevent such attacks and will roughly follow the "Green Line" marking the border before Israel occupied the West Bank in the 1967 Middle East War.
But Palestinian Cabinet Minister Saeb Erekat accused Israel of trying to start "a new apartheid system" with the fence.
(Agencies via Xinhua News Agency June 18, 2002)
