An Israeli court on Thursday charged five Palestinians with planting a pipe bomb next to a Jerusalem monastery and planning other attacks around the city, a police spokesman said.

The bomb, put last month in a rubbish bag outside the monastery, severed the hand of a municipal worker who picked up the bag.

Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said the five men, residents of Jerusalem, were tied to the Islamist group Hamas and had admitted after their arrest that they planned to carry out more attacks against Israelis in Jerusalem.

Rosenfeld said the men were not involved in a March bombing near a Jerusalem bus stop which killed one woman and wounded dozens of others. It was the first fatal bombing, which police blamed on Palestinian militants, since a wave of lethal attacks in the second Palestinian uprising that ran from 2000 to 2005.

No date for the trial of the five has yet been set.