Eight Palestinians dead in West Bank road accident

Feb 16, 2012, 12:33 GMT

Jerusalem - At least eight Palestinians - seven children and a school teacher - died Thursday when an Israeli truck hit a Palestinian school bus taking pupils on a field trip along a West Bank road, police said.

Some 30 were injured and were being treated in hospitals in Ramallah and Jerusalem, Israeli police spokesman Mickey Rosenfeld told dpa.

Initial reports said the fatalities were all children but it later emerged that a teacher was among them.

The truck and school bus collided frontally, in rainy and cloudy weather, at a chaotic junction between Jerusalem and Ramallah, near a Jewish settlement.

The bus overturned and caught fire.

A joint Israeli-Palestinian team were investigating the accident, Rosenfeld said. The driver of the truck, an Arab-Israeli, was being treated in hospital, and would be questioned by police as they tried to determine how exactly the collusion occurred.

In Ramallah, the parents of the children involved in the accident were asking why the school trip had gone ahead on such a rainy, wintery day.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas declared three days of mourning over the accident.