Olmert was to meet with security chiefs and cabinet ministers Tuesday to decide whether to launch a military offensive against the Palestinian Authority.

Earlier Tuesday, Israeli army officials said planes attacked an empty warehouse in Gaza City. The building was being used to build rockets and no one was injured in the strike, the army said.

Even though the militant group Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for Monday's attack outside a fast-food restaurant that killed nine people and wounded about 60 others, Israel says it blames the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority.

"Israel sees the Palestinian Authority as responsible for what happened yesterday," said Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Gideon Meir.

"We don't care whose work it was, whether it's Islamic Jihad or al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades or Hamas," he said. "From our point of view, they're all terror organizations. Now, maybe the hands are not the hands of Hamas, but the voice and the ideology is the ideology of Hamas."

In a United Nations Security Council debate on Monday, Israeli ambassador Dan Gillerman included the Hamas-led government in a new "axis of terror."

"A dark cloud is looming above our region, and it is metastasizing as a result of the statements and actions by leaders of Iran, Syria, and the newly elected government of the Palestinian Authority," Gillerman said.

Israel placed security forces on high alert and is considering declaring Hamas an "enemy entity," according to the Associated Press. That would allow Israel to carry out direct strikes against the Palestinian Authority.

Other measures could include tightening travel restrictions in the West Bank and Gaza, and targeted killings of Islamic Jihad members.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who heads the Fatah party, condemned the attack, but Hamas called it a justifiable response to Israeli "aggression and siege."

Washington warned Hamas against defending terror acts, while the European Union, Britain and Russia have called on Israel to show restraint in its response.

The last suicide attack to happen inside Israel on the Jewish holiday of Passover, in 2002, led to a three-week military offensive in the West Bank. Former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, who lies in a hospital in a coma, called the attack the Passover massacre.

Recent statements by the Palestinian government, Iran and Syria, including one by Hamas on Monday defending the suicide bombing, "are clear declarations of war, and I urge each and every one of you to listen carefully and take them at face value," said Israel's U.N. Ambassador Dan Gillerman.

"A dark cloud is looming above our region, and it is metastasizing as a result of the statements and actions by leaders of Iran, Syria, and the newly elected government of the Palestinian Authority," Gillerman warned.

The Palestinian U.N. observer, Riyad Mansour, condemned Monday's suicide bombing and the loss of innocent civilians on both sides, but attacked Israel for trying to portray its latest military escalation - which killed 21 Palestinians from April 7-9 - as a response to violence from the Palestinian territories.

"Israel, the occupying power has been relentless in its grave breaches of international law, including the willful killing and injury of civilians and the practice of extrajudicial executions," he said. "What the Israeli government is doing and what it has been doing throughout its nearly 39-year-old military occupation is clearly intended to serve its clear political objectives of inflicting maximum pain, suffering and loss on the Palestinian people while it entrenches its occupation."

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan called the escalating violence "very worrying" and urged both sides to avoid putting civilians at risk. He also announced that the Quartet of Mideast peacemakers - the United Nations, the United States, the European Union and Russia - would meet in New York on May 9 to discuss how to move the stalled roadmap to peace forward.

Gillerman told the Security Council that Monday's "horrific act of terrorism as well as the ones that preceded it are the direct result of the new axis of terror" comprising Iran and Syria and the "terrorist organizations they have been harboring, nurturing, financing and supporting, namely Hamas and Hezbollah."

Recent statements by Hamas leaders refusing to recognize Israel, and by Iran's president who said Saturday that Israel is a "rotten, dried tree" that is "on the road to being eliminated," represent "the stated goal of this axis of terror."

Mansour urged the Security Council and the international community to condemn the Israeli attacks and take measures to halt the latest escalation.

Gillerman urged the international community and the Security Council "to take swift actions to try and prevent the next murder which is already on its way."

Since January, he said, 11 major suicide terrorist attacks have been prevented and 90 potential suicide bombers have been arrested.

While Israel regrets any loss of life, it will not sit idly by and allow "human bombs" or rockets to penetrate the country and kill Israelis _ and he asked whether every country wouldn't do the same to eliminate a similar danger.

"The danger I must add, not just to Israel but also to the whole free world, and to civilization as we know it, as this axis of evil and terror sows the seeds of the first world war of the 21st century," Gillerman said.

Last week a 12-year-old Palestinian girl was killed and five of her family members were wounded when an IDF artillery shell struck their house in the northern Gaza Strip town of Beit Lahiya. In response, IDF Chief of Staff Dan Halutz asked Mofaz to reinstate the previous safety regulations, but was turned down.

"We have no way of ensuring that civilians will not be hurt in the next shelling," an IDF officer recently told Haaretz. "But the bombardment [of targets in Gaza] disrupts the activities of Qassam rocket launching cells. They feel threatened and fire quickly, without taking aim, in order to get out of the area. That's why lots of the rockets fired lately landed in the sea. We cannot allow a situation in which our civilians, [who live] around the Strip, will be held hostage by terrorist organizations," the officer said.

The Observer (UK) recently reported on Mr. Yihiyeh Musa, a Hamas member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, who said Hamas had moved into a "new era" which did not require suicide attacks. He was quoted as saying, "The suicide bombings happened in an exceptional period and they have now stopped," he said. "They came to an end as a change of belief." (April 9, 2006).

One would think this is good news, especially after the death and destruction such bombing caused. This, one would imagine, should be even better news for Israel and the U.S. given they both have continuously linked such bombings to the reason that the never-ending peace process was unable to actually reach its destination, peace.

But cautious optimism was not the case. Instead, the U.S. wasted no time in dehumanizing the newly elected Palestinian parliamentarians and cabinet ministers. The war of words has been nearly non-stop since Hamas' victory with all levels of government in D.C. making the case that Hamas can't change and there is no reason to let them try. Next was a cessation of funding to the Palestinian government and a request for all other countries of the world to follow suit. Then Israel severed all Israeli bank ties with the Palestinian banking system, government related and non-government related.

Only last week came a U.S. Department of Treasury decree making it illegal for Americans to do business with the Palestinian government. We wait to see tomorrow's nooses.

All of this as Palestinians watch in dismay, trying to maintain a dignified life under an humiliating military occupation. The international community demanded Palestinians hold free and fair elections at all levels of government, so the Palestinians did just that, and superbly given their reality. But after voting a reflection of their bitter reality of being caged in open air prisons in their own homeland, the U.S. is now punishing them for not voting as the U.S. wanted.

Most Palestinians today are asking simple rhetorical questions, if the past government was, and it was, corrupt -- financially, politically and administratively -- and we voted them out of power, why can't the U.S. see this as a positive development?

What does the U.S. want, to bring back a proven corrupt government that made a mockery of international aid, including U.S. funds? Also, if Israel has blocked every attempt for Palestinians to solve their issues at the negotiating table, can't the U.S. understand that the voting Hamas in office was a simple non-violent way to tell the world, end this occupation or take some of your own medicine?

Conditions on the ground have never been so tense. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict, which has always been a political conflict, is being converted, thanks to the U.S. and Israel, into a humanitarian crisis. The fear is that hungry persons react in unpredictable ways.

The greater fear is that if the U.S. and Israel are successful in collapsing the Hamas government and Hamas in turn decides to abandoned democratic means to express itself, we will be back where we started from, suicide bombings killing innocents and setting the agenda from outside any known political framework. Does this serve U.S. and Israeli interests? We are all wondering!

Sam Bahour is a Palestinian-American businessman living in the Israeli- occupied Palestinian city of El-Bireh, the sister city of Ramallah. He is co- author of HOMELAND: Oral Histories of Palestine and Palestinians (1994) and may be reached at sbahour@palnet.com.

Weighing their response, interim Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and key Cabinet ministers decided Tuesday that Hamas is to be held responsible for the attack.

In one of a list of measures, the Jerusalem residency rights of four Hamas lawmakers from Jerusalem are to be revoked, participants in the meeting said.

When the old President Izetbegovic in Sarajevo in 1993 was demanding help from his European neighbors, most of them turned a deaf ear to him, preferring the siren songs of the Christian aggressors of his country (militias and armies supported by the government of the Catholic Tujman and the Orthodox Milosevic). More than a true European, Izetbegovic was perceived as a Muslim: to his own despair, he had to turn himself to the further Muslim countries who were quicker at sending money and some mudjahidins to defend Sarajevo and Bosnia. Being constrained to do so, the Bosnians were set further apart from the European public opinions, who were unable to even pay attention to the Orthodox Serb Bosnians defending the multicultural Sarajevo against the Milosevic-backed Serb army: they preferred to see a simple "clash of civilization" rather than a complex web of competing conceptions of identities and interests.

When the isolated president Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah was demanding help from the international community to not freeze the international aid to his people, the divided EU preferred the easiest way: follow the American Hegemon in demonizing the Palestinian voters. More than somebody committed to the Road Map, Mahmoud Abbas was perceived as somebody unable to win an election with his so-called "moderate party". The West easily forgot that its asymmetric pressure on Israelis and Palestinians probably did a lot to promote the more radical forces in Palestine. Have we already forgotten that the newly elected Mahmoud Abbas (supported and pressured by the West) managed to secure in February 2005 a truce from all Palestinian armed factions in order to relaunch the Road Map process (at that time Hamas even started mentioning the possible acknowledgement of Israel in exchange of the 1967 borders). In exchange, the Israelis declined any commitment to the Road Map, and went on with the unilateral withdrawal of Gaza, one of the poorest areas in the region, to be managed by a destroyed administration. The Israelis were praised for the withdrawal, while they were continuing the construction of the settlements in the West Bank, as well as a methodic "land grab" around Jerusalem in beyond, as recently emphasized by The Economist[1].

In the current circumstances of demonisation of the Palestinian government, it seems that the only possibility for the Palestinian Authority will be to find money by knocking at the door of its most anti-American neighbors: the EU might be complicit to have reinforced an alliance between the Palestinian and the Iranian governments, at a time when Mahmoud Abbas, and even some Hamas leaders were ready to start off some negotiations[2].

This is the result of two missed opportunities: in addition to rightly putting pressure on the Palestinians, the EU and the rest of the West failed to 1. engaging the Palestinian leadership, at the right time, and at the right level (using track II diplomacy in order to prepare the grounds for official talks); 2. putting pressure on Israel to deliver its commitments on the Road Map. The EU or the US should not shy away from this pressure: they would just act as the relay of the always more numerous voices in Israel that demand for it. In the April 13th "Le Monde", the Tel-Aviv University professor of contemporary history, Shlomo Sand, asks: "Is the world too lenient with Israel?". He underlines the "historically imbalanced relationship of the US with Israelis and Arabs"[3]. Being even more explicit, another article from Haaretz, republished in the International Herald Tribune recently affirmed: "so pro-Israel that it hurts"[4]. Its author, Daniel Levy, served as a policy adviser in the Israeli prime minister's office in the government of Ehud Barak and was the lead Israeli drafter of the 2003 Geneva peace Initiative. His message is more addressed to Americans than to Europeans, but for whoever is interested to bring peace in the region, the words of a truly committed Israeli peacenik are clear: the mediator, be it the US, the Quartet or the EU, has to understand both parties, but also to be forceful with each of them.

If the Europeans do not apply their lessons from Bosnia in the case of Palestine, no peace will be possible in the Middle East. Besides the probable anger among the Muslims that will continue and grow worldwide, and especially in Berlin, London and Paris, the European leaders should also fear the lessons that historians will draw from this period, as they are already doing from the recent history in Bosnia.