Jerusalem massacre - a defining moment

One of the students, Yitzhak Dadon, said he shot the attacker twice in the head, neutralizing him before a soldier killed the man with an automatic rifle. "I laid on the roof of the study hall, cocked my gun and waited for him. He came out of the library spraying automatic fire," he said.

	Jerusalem massacre - a defining moment
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After the shooting, hundreds of seminary students demonstrated outside the building, screaming for revenge and chanting "death to Arabs."

Rabbi Shlomo Amar, one of Israel's two chief rabbis, led a prayer session at the seminary after the shooting. Students huddled together, and many sobbed uncontrollably.

The seminar is the Mercaz Harav yeshiva in the Kiryat Moshe quarter at the entrance to Jerusalem, a prestigious center of Jewish studies identified with the leadership of the Jewish settlement movement in the West Bank. The seminary, founded by the late Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Hacohen Kook, the movement's spiritual founder, serves some 400 high school students and young Israeli soldiers, and many of them carry arms.

"It's very sad tonight in Jerusalem," Mayor Uri Lupolianski told Channel 2 TV. "Many people were killed in the heart of Jerusalem."

In Beirut, Lebanon, Hezbollah's Manar satellite television station said a previously unknown group called the Martyrs of Imad Mughniyeh and Gaza was responsible for the attack. The claim could not immediately be verified. Mughniyeh, a Hezbollah terror mastermind, was killed in a car bomb in Syria last month. Hezbollah has blamed Israel for the assassination, and Israel has been fearing a revenge attack.

In Gaza, Hamas stopped just short of claiming responsibility. "We bless the (Jerusalem) operation. It will not be the last," the group said in a statement sent to reporters by text message.

In mosques in Gaza City and the northern Gaza Strip, many residents gave prayers of thanksgiving - only recited in cases of great victory.

In Jebaliya, about 7,000 Gazans of different factions marched in the streets, firing in the air in celebration, and visited homes of those killed and wounded in the last incursion. In the southern town of Rafah, residents distributed sweets to moving cars, and militants fired mortars in celebration.

The attack came a day after Rice persuaded Abbas to return to peace talks with Israel. Abbas briefly suspended talks to protest an Israeli offensive in Gaza that killed more than 120 Palestinians.

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