Luckily it was a Monday, so school started at 9:20 a.m. — an hour and 20 minutes later than usual.
As he lay there, a huge thunder shook the building. It took Yuval only a minute to realize that Palestinian terrorism wasn’t just a news item anymore. This time, he was frightfully close to a personal encounter with terror.
“I looked out the window and saw a thick pillar of smoke rising from a burning car,” the 17-year-old student recalled. “I was scared to death. I didn’t know what to do.”
It was the fourth car bomb to explode in Jerusalem in a 12-hour period. Had it not been a Monday, Yuval probably would have been on the street, right next to the booby-trapped car, waiting for the school bus to pick him up.
Soon after came a fifth explosion, the most violent attack of all, but it wasn’t a car bomb this time around.
A Palestinian suicide bomber disguised as a fervently religious Jew blew himself up outside a hospital entrance in downtown Jerusalem Tuesday, wounding 21 people, one of them critically.
The bomber detonated his explosives when two border police approached him.
Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack, a day after two bombs went off in French Hill in the northern part of the city and slightly wounded six people. One detonated in the adjacent neighborhood of Ma’alot Dafna and one in Gilo — a southern suburb of the capital that in recent weeks has been the target of continuous rifle and mortar attacks.
“At first I didn’t want to go to school. I was too shocked,” Yuval said. But he boarded the first bus and went to share his first-hand experience of terrorism with his friends.
Some 1.9 million students started school this week with a dark cloud of terrorism hanging over their heads. The problem was particularly acute in Jerusalem and the settlements.
Due to a “mini-cease-fire” agreement, schools in Gilo were spared the shooting and mortar shelling from the adjacent Palestinian town of Beit Jala that had become routine.
However, the school year started with “specific intelligence warnings” for possible terrorist attacks in the capital. One terrorist cell was uncovered last week in the Arab neighborhood of Beit Hanina, but others managed to plant their bombs.
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine reportedly claimed responsibility for Monday’s blasts, saying they were in retaliation for Israel’s targeted assassination last week of the group’s secretary-general, Mustafa Zabri.
Tuesday’s suicide bombing took place shortly before 8 a.m., not far from the site of a suicide bombing last month at the Sbarro pizzeria that killed 15.
Police said that several minutes before Tuesday’s explosion, a number of civilians had reported a suspicious figure in the area. Moments before the blast, two police officers saw a man who appeared to be Orthodox walk briskly past them, looking anxious.
“A woman came up after him and said he looked suspicious, so we turned around and followed him,” one of the officers, Guy Mugrabi, told Israel Radio.
“We did not yell at him to stop, because at that hour, Nevi’im Street is blaring with horns and traffic,” Mugrabi said.
The officers approached the man, who “didn’t notice us at first. Then he stopped, glanced back toward us, smiled and extended his hand back and reached into a rear pocket of the bag. It was then clear what was going to happen,” Mugrabi said.
Mugrabi, 24, said the seconds before the blast were “like a movie. I thought of everything that is dear to me.”
Mugrabi was slightly wounded in the blast; his fellow officer sustained critical wounds to the head.
Mugrabi said he had been stationed in Jerusalem as part of stepped-up security against terrorism. These measures lessened the casualties of Monday’s bombings, according to Israeli security sources, who believe the PFLP had intended to target schools, which had just opened for the academic year.
Indeed, tension was felt in most schools. Police reinforcements were deployed near schools and in the main traffic areas leading to them. The Education Ministry recruited some 3,300 guards to protect the entire education system, but many of the guards were unarmed because they were ineligible for gun permits.
“We were instructed not to assemble on the steps in front of our school,” Yuval said. “In fact, only students our age are allowed to leave the school compound during breaks. All others have to stay inside the building.”
Politically, reaction to the bombing followed a familiar pattern. Israel said it holds Yasser Arafat responsible for the attack, while the Palestinian Authority president said he regrets attacks against civilians in general, “whether they are Palestinians or Israelis,” without condemning Tuesday’s specific incident.
But as of Wednesday, hopes for possible cease-fire negotiations between Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Arafat were rising.
Just a day after prospects for a meeting appeared dim, both Peres and Arafat spoke optimistically of the possibility to try to arrange a lasting cease-fire to nearly a year of Israeli-Palestinian violence. Peres told reporters that he prefers to meet with Arafat in the region, and away from the prying eyes of the media.
Sources close to the matter say various scheduling options were being suggested by both sides. Previous meetings between the pair have resulted in cease-fire agreements that failed to take hold.
Peres is expected to put on the table, in addition to discussion of a cease-fire, a proposal for Israel to build two bridges in the Gaza Strip to enable Palestinians to travel without having to go through Israeli roadblocks.
The proposal was revealed Tuesday by a senior source in Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s entourage traveling in Russia as part of a plan to offer measures to ease the living conditions of the Palestinians.
Meanwhile, violence continued on Wednesday, as Israeli missiles hit a Palestinian police post in the Gaza Strip. Palestinian sources said one person was injured.
The missile attack came after Palestinians fired mortars into an Israeli community in the Gaza Strip, injuring no one.
Security was a major concern in the Jewish settlements.
Elementary school students at Kfar Darom in the Gaza Strip arrived in school Sunday in armored cars. The army wouldn’t take any chances that the first day of school would begin with a bloody attack on a bus.
“In Kfar Darom, we are all one family. But I don’t feel safe, even in the armored truck,” said Yair Amitai, 13, who lost his mother in one of the first terrorist attacks in Gaza last year. “I prefer to go with my father.”
The good news is that despite all the warnings and threats there, the school year opened smoothly. Only a few parents didn’t send their children to school for fear of terrorism.
“There is simply no other alternative,” said Edna Nir, the mother of two children in elementary school. “We cannot leave the children at home” until Peres and Arafat “sign a cease-fire agreement.”
But after parents in Gilo threatened to keep their children home from school, city officials made efforts to fortify some of the schools that might be targeted if the Palestinians resumed fire in the Bethlehem area.
In Jerusalem, meanwhile, Yuval and his next-door neighbor and classmate Ariel Siman couldn’t concentrate on their studies; they just couldn’t get the bomb that exploded near the entrance of their homes out of their minds.
“Our parents should no longer worry that something can happen to us if we go downtown,” Ariel told Yuval. “The terrorists are now sending the bombs ‘home delivery.'”