In a day of bloody attacks around the world, terrorists on Tuesday killed dozens in Israel, Moscow and Iraq.

Palestinian suicide bombers blew up two buses in southern Israel, killing at least 16 people. A woman strapped with explosives blew herself up outside a busy Moscow subway station, killing at least 10 people. And in what appears to be the deadliest episode in a wave of abductions in Iraq, a militant Islamic group aired a gruesome video on its Web site that it said showed the killings of 12 Nepalese workers who were kidnapped two weeks ago.

The workers would be the biggest group of hostages slain in Iraq during a five-month period in which dozens of foreigners have been abducted by insurgents and criminal gangs. The killings would rank among the world’s largest hostage executions in recent decades.

As the four-minute video appeared on the site of the Ansar al Sunna Army on Tuesday afternoon, French officials were working feverishly to persuade another militant group to free two French journalists captured two weeks ago south of Baghdad. A new deadline passed Tuesday night with no word on the pair, Christian Chesnot of Radio France International and Georges Malbrunot of Le Figaro newspaper.

Their captors, calling themselves the Islamic Army in Iraq, had set a 48-hour deadline for the French government to repeal a recent law banning Islamic head scarves in public schools. The deadline was extended 24 hours Monday night. The same group is believed to have been responsible for the abduction and killing of an Italian journalist last week.

The Nepalese workers were seized sometime after Aug. 19 as they traveled from Jordan through a region west of Baghdad that also has seen numerous killings and kidnappings of foreigners. The militants said they captured the workers for helping U.S. forces but made no specific demands.

Bus bombs in Israel

Nearly simultaneous explosions destroyed two buses in southern Israel on Tuesday, killing at least 16 people and wounding 85 in the first terrorist attack inside Israel in five months.

Authorities warned that the death toll could rise much higher because of the severity of the blasts, which hollowed out both buses and sent dozens of wounded tumbling out of the burning vehicles.

Rescue and recovery volunteers collect body parts from a destroyed bus at the scene of a double-bombing in Beersheba, Israel. Two buses blew up Tuesday in the southern Israeli city, killing at least 16 people.

The blasts — triggered by two suicide bombers — occurred just seconds apart around 3 p.m. (7 a.m. CDT) as the commuter buses were about 100 yards from each other in one of the major intersections in Beersheba, a large industrial city that had until Tuesday been largely spared the wave of terror that has swept over Israel for the last four years.

The Palestinian militant group Hamas claimed responsibility for the attacks, calling them retaliation for the Israeli assassinations earlier this year of its spiritual leader, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, and his successor, Abdel Aziz Rantisi. Those killings took place shortly after the last attack inside Israel, a suicide bombing in the port city of Ashdod in March that killed 10 people.

The attack was the deadliest since a female suicide bomber killed 21 people nearly a year ago in the northern city of Haifa.

By Tuesday evening, the twin attacks had already prompted what appeared to be a major military operation in Hebron, the West Bank city where the two bombers came from, according to Hamas.

Hamas distributed a leaflet claiming responsibility for Tuesday’s attack, but did not name the bombers. “If you thought that the martyrdom of our leaders would weaken our missions and discourage us from Jihad, then you are dreaming,” the statement said.

Moscow terror

A female suicide bomber set off a powerful homemade explosive device outside a Moscow subway station Tuesday evening, shooting metal shrapnel through a crowd of commuters and killing at least 10 people, authorities said.

The attack was the second terrorist attack to hit Russia in a week, officials said. Seven days earlier, almost to the hour, two Russian jetliners crashed within minutes of each other in what officials determined were terrorist bombings. All 90 people aboard were killed, and the investigation has focused on two Chechen women believed to have been passengers.

A militant Muslim web site published a statement late Tuesday claiming responsibility for the subway bombing on behalf of the “Islambouli Brigades,” a group that also claimed it caused the jetliner crashes with suicide teams in retribution for Russia’s war with Islamic rebels in Chechnya. The veracity of neither claim could be confirmed.

Mayor Yuri Luzhkov told reporters near the Rizhskaya subway stop in northern Moscow that the bomber was walking toward the station shortly after 8 p.m. but turned around when she saw two police officers.

She “decided to destroy herself in a crowd of people” in a busy area between the subway station and a nearby department store-supermarket complex, Luzhkov said, adding that the bomb was packed with bolts and pieces of metal.

“There was a desire to cause maximum destruction,” he said.

A spokesman for the Federal Security Service, Sergei Ignatchenko, told NTV television that the casualty toll had risen to 10 dead and 51 wounded, of whom 49 were hospitalized. Many of the injured were believed to be seriously wounded, and the death toll was expected to rise. It was not clear Tuesday night if the number of dead included the bomber.