Hamas officials on Tuesday warned that the bomb attack on a Jerusalem bus a day earlier was “just the beginning”, though they refrained from claiming responsibility for the blast.
So far, no group has claimed responsibility for the attack, though all of them – Hamas, the Islamic Jihad, and even Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah – welcomed it.
In recent years, Hamas would delay publication of claims of responsibility for such attacks, explaining it wanted to protect its members.
But Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said on Tuesday the attack was a “natural response to the Israeli crimes and in particular the executions and defiling of the Al-Aqsa Mosque.”
Husam Badran, a senior Hamas official in Samaria, said that the attack was the first of many in a series of attacks designed to surprise the “enemy wherever he is.”
Badran stressed that no one has the ability to stop the “popular rage” and added that the attack proves that the Palestinian people will not abandon the struggle.