The Force of a Death Wish Hits City Hard


June 19, 2002

By MEGAN K. STACK , Times Staff Writer

JERUSALEM -- The bespectacled graduate student waited on the curb of a working-class neighborhood for the No. 32 bus, then scrambled up the steps behind an elderly Jewish man. Mohammed Ghoul was 22. He wore red Tuesday, clutched a bomb stuffed with nails and went forth into the brilliant morning "to kill and be killed."

The bus that crawled through the bleating traffic on the outskirts of Jerusalem was crowded with schoolchildren, older students and blue-collar workers nearing retirement. A pregnant woman. The Israeli president's longtime maid. A fifth-grade girl on her way to school in Valley of the Cross.

There was something odd about this urgent young newcomer, many passengers thought. He climbed aboard too fast. He didn't pay his fare.

"He looked like a terrorist," 15-year-old schoolboy Michael Lasri said. "Like I thought a terrorist should look."

But it was a moment too quick for thought. Tugged by instinctlater, in his hospital cot, he called it "God's hand"Lasri lunged for the floor beneath his seat and blacked out.

The boom of the explosion echoed for blocks around.

"Everything flew," said Shlomi Kalderon, a tow-truck driver who was idling behind the No. 32 at a jammed intersection.

At least 19 people besides the bomber died. Come nightfall, scores lay wounded in Jerusalem's hospitals. In more than 20 gory months of intifada, months that have left cafes empty and children jumpy, that have strewn carnage and paranoia in the rough streets of this ancient limestone cityin all that time, this was the deadliest attack to strike Jerusalem. It was, in fact, the deadliest in six years.

Residents of this city have slipped in and out of war for decades, have taken turns on both ends of brutal siege, have split and revolted and conquered and lost. Now fear tinges the shaded streets again. It is of the incessant, escalating attacks by Palestinian militants.

On their side, militant groups say that Israel will notand should notlive peacefully so long as it occupies Palestinian territory. For months, Palestinian cities and towns have suffered raids and sieges by Israeli soldiers, tanks and helicopters. The Palestinians have seen their homes bulldozed, their infrastructure destroyed and their neighbors shot for breaking curfew. Simple trips to work or to visit family have become arduous, even impossible, amid roadblocks, curfews and raids.

"How beautiful it is to kill and to be killed," read a suicide note from Ghoul, an earnest student of Islam apparently associated with the militant Islamic group Hamas. "Not to love death, but to struggle for life, to kill and be killed for the lives of the coming generation."

When Ghoul set off his bomb, Kalderon's windshield shattered. He'd just dropped his daughters off at nursery school. He tripped from the cab of his truck and stumbled agape toward the wreckage.

"But the sights at my feet were too horrific," he said later. "I had to step back and calm down. It was huge. People were lying with their eyes open."

On a crossroads slicked with blood, rush hour stood still. Bits of flesh, broken glass and twisted metal had been flung in a wide circle. Inside the blasted bus, corpses sat dead in their seats. Hysteria set in.

"Where's my sister?" a woman screamed at rescue workers.

"You see? You see? You see?" a Jewish schoolboy in an oxford shirt and skullcap screamed at foreign journalists. He stumbled and kept yelling. "You see?"

When Lasri blinked back into consciousness, there was nothing overhead but a deep blue sky. The roof of the bus had been peeled and curled back like the lid of a sardine can. He looked around. Limbs, bones and purses cluttered the street. It's like television, he thought. He couldn't move.

Lasri attends a technical high school. On Tuesday, he overslept, then raced to catch his bus. He planned to spend the day tinkering with a remote control car for a science fair. Instead, somebody dragged him from the wreckage and drove him to the hospital.

"They want to kill us, don't you see?" he said, running a hand over his scabbed forehead. Beside him, his mother nodded gently.

It was a few hours after the attack, and social workers wove among the cots and gurneys of the hospital, bringing bad news to the injured. Across the way, they were telling a wounded young boy that his older sister had died in the attack. Soon they would come to Michael and tell him that his friend had been killed. His parents and uncle already knew. "It's not a question of land," the boy said. "They want to see us dead."

The day dragged on. Soldiers set up roadblocks all over town, and traffic wheezed along under the baking sun. Arik Feldman, managing director of the Egged bus company, asked Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to recruit 3,000 unemployed Israelis to work as security guards on buses.

Reports of danger pulsed on the radio and television. As many as four suicide bombers are about to strike at Jerusalem, intelligence sources warned local broadcasters. By the time evening prayers rang from the mosques in East Jerusalem, the streets were all but empty.

"It's like beads in a chain," said Karmit Rintzler, who stood weeping softly on the fringes of 21-year-old Shiri Najari's funeral. "This is my second friend to lose a child."

As the sun sank lower and blue light smudged the hills outside Jerusalem, families came to bury the bones of their dead. The funerals were neither fancy nor long. The mourners came in Orthodox black and frayed blue jeans. They gathered in a parking lot at the edge of a sprawling hillside graveyard west of Jerusalem. They stood with crossed arms and trembling chins to hear the Psalms, the prayers and the bitter lamentations.

"Our neighbors do not know what peace is," said Rabbi Mordechai Najari, a relative of the dead young woman.

Shiri Najari's remains rode to the graveyard in the back of a van, wrapped in a shawl, arranged on a scarred stretcher. At the sight of the bundle a hush fell, then a thin cry rose from the women.

The men and women cried into the necks of their neighbors, or bent over the hoods of cars to weep. They rocked over their prayer books.

"Know where you came from and know where you're going," they sang. "And before whom you shall be held accountable."

Najari would have turned 22 next month. After finishing her army service, she had traveled alone for a year in South America. She wrote to her family that the world was beautiful after all.

"Stay there," they urged her. "There's nothing for you here, and it's dangerous." But she missed them too much to stay away. She flew home and applied to medical school.

"Look at me one last moment," said her sister, Shelley, who spoke to the crowd in her dead sister's sunglasses. "And see that behind your glasses, I am crying."

The men lost their footing and clutched their hats as they clambered through the graveyard with the stretcher on their shoulders. The marble tombs of Gival Shaul are packed so tight that there's scarcely room to walk between the stones. This is the first glimpse of Jerusalem that greets travelers on the road from Tel Aviv: dizzying sweeps of bleached graves climbing the hills.

At the rear of the Najari funeral, a second procession of mourners paced past carrying the body of 51-year-old Rahamim Zidkiyahu, who was at the wheel of the No. 32. The two funerals blurred for a moment, then split on separate rocky paths.

When the bodies were buried, the mourners paused at the cemetery gate and washed their hands three times to remove the dust of death. Then these people of Jerusalem made their way home as darkness came over the hills.