Bus on Jaffa Road Page 4

  “I’m smack dab in the middle of my twenties,” he wrote in a letter to his younger sister, Amy, when he turned twenty-five three weeks earlier. Matt seemed surprised, perhaps a bit bedeviled that he had reached a quarter-­century of life, and yet he also seemed to embrace the fact that he had embarked on a new, richer and more serious life as a rabbi. “A friend asked me if I felt different,” Matt wrote to Amy, then a student at Washington University in St. Louis. The friend meant it as a joke, perhaps just one of those conversational lines that emerges at important birthdays and other milestones of life, Matt said. But he took it as a moment to reflect on how his life was, indeed, changing. “I answered I did feel different,” he wrote, adding in jest, “I am expecting my beard to change color any minute now.”

  Like Sara that morning, Matt dressed to fight off the February chill, with a green coat with brown collar atop a gray fleece vest jacket and black jeans. Over his shoulder, he carried a backpack with two Talmud volumes and a spiral notebook containing his ideas—some written in Hebrew, some in English—for an instructional Haggadah he had been assembling to use at a seder during the upcoming Passover holidays and a visit by his parents. He also brought along a leather book about two inches thick, which included, among other prayers, a meditation on peace.

  The Number 18 pulled up to Jaffa Road. Beyond the windows on the right side of the bus, passengers could see the walls of the Old City and the Jaffa Gate. The bus turned left on Jaffa Road and headed north for several blocks and stopped at a series of bus shelters outside Jerusalem’s City Hall.

  The sidewalk was crowded that morning with commuters awaiting buses. A group of passengers got off, including Jeffery Sosland, the American graduate student who was researching water resources. He walked south for a few blocks in search of a charter company that would take him to Jordan.

  No one seemed to pay any attention to a man who got on the Number 18 at the City Hall bus stop. The man was dressed like an Israeli student and carried a duffel bag.

  The man found a seat in the middle of the bus—next to the rear door that passengers used to exit.

  The bus doors closed and the Number 18 eased into the Jaffa Road traffic. The bus passed the police station. It crossed Zion Square, then passed by the streets leading to the vegetable stands of the Mahane Yehuda market and the rows of small clothing stores.

  After another mile, the bus approached a major intersection—Sarei Yisrael Street. Leah Stein Mousa rose from her seat and walked to the rear exit door and stepped into the well to get off the bus quickly. The man with the duffel bag sat silently to Mousa’s left, separated from her by a clear plastic partition.

  The bus pulled up to a stop on the corner of Jaffa Road and Sarei Yisrael Street. Another bus rolled up close behind. A white van stopped just to the left of both buses. On the right, twenty-four-year-old Avi Huja touched the brakes in his white Mitsubishi van. Huja could have pulled up next to the Number 18. But he stopped a few feet behind the bus in the right-hand lane.

  Inside the bus, as she waited for the door to open, Leah Mousa noticed someone stand up to her left. It was the young man with the duffel bag.

  He was holding the bag in front of his chest as if he was carrying a satchel of groceries. After pausing a moment, he stepped into the aisle of the bus and yelled, “Allahu Akbar”—Arabic for “God is great.”

  Then he pushed a button.

  Chapter 2

  The worst sound after a terrorist bombing is no sound—silence. It is the telltale sign of death, say Jerusalem’s most experienced emergency medics. Silence means that those closest to the blast have been killed or hurt so badly that they can’t even scream in pain or shout for help. And if a bomb explodes on a crowded thoroughfare such as Jerusalem’s Jaffa Road during a morning rush hour, silence means the casualty count will be high.

  On February 25, 1996, David Sofer, an eighteen-year-old ambulance driver and emergency medic, heard the unmistakable metallic thud of the blast as he walked east on Sarei Yisrael Street toward the junction of Jaffa Road.

  Then came the silence.

  “Oh, no,” Sofer thought to himself. “Not another one.”

  It was 6:45 a.m. Sofer, a devout Orthodox Jew, had just left the yeshiva where he frequently studied and participated in morning prayers. His shift at the ambulance station not far from Jerusalem’s Central Bus Terminal near Jaffa Road was not scheduled to begin for another fifteen minutes. He figured he would enjoy a quiet walk as the dawn broke over his city.

  But as he left the prayer service and stepped onto the sidewalk, Sofer felt the ground shake. Smoke rose into the morning sky about four hundred meters away and Sofer, who had recently begun his mandatory military service in the Israeli army, wondered for a moment whether a missile had struck a building. With his dark eyes and olive skin, Sofer would eventually earn a spot in the elite Duvdevan commando unit that infiltrated Palestinian neighborhoods on the West Bank or in the Gaza Strip. Instinctively and without waiting for orders or even checking his radio, he broke into a run toward the smoke. As he drew closer, he found himself composing a mental checklist of what he should do when he reached the scene. First, he would look for anyone seriously injured. Then, he would determine who needed attention first.

  He ran across a bridge and saw the Number 18 bus—then felt the silence.

  “It was quiet,” he said. “And it was a very scary moment. You expect to see movement. You expect to see people running. But as I was coming closer, I felt like I walked into a cemetery. Nobody was moving.”

  The bomb in the black bag had done its job. “The bus went up in the air,” a witness said. The blast and its orange fireball tore off the bus roof, peeling back the steel and tossing it behind the rear windows and into another bus as if it were tinfoil.

  But the black bag contained more than just explosives. Packed around the bomb were several pounds of nails, screws and steel ball bearings. When the bomb exploded, the nails, screws and ball bearings sprayed from the bag, shredding the bus and beyond with a steely shower of shrapnel. The glass in all the windows was gone—shattered and scattered across Jaffa Road. Passengers had no time to duck or even realize what had happened, police said. The bus’s seats were riddled with pellets. So were the bodies. In the back of the bus, a man in a white shirt sat lifeless in his seat, leaning forward slightly, his right hand reaching through a window. Several seats away, a bloody, severed hand hung from a bent and jagged steel window frame.

  For those nearby—or those like David Sofer who ran to the scene hoping to save passengers—it was moment of quick decisions amid gruesome chaos. But it was also a moment to realize how little could be done for the victims, as Michael Dahan noted when he saw the wreckage. “There were only pieces of bodies all over,” said Dahan, a thirty-two-year-old former Israeli soldier who was one of the first to arrive on the scene. “We gave people water. What more can you do? Some were dying right there.”

  The blast-cloud of shattered glass, twisted metal, and ripped flesh sprayed through car and apartment windows. It covered parts of nearby roofs and clung to the branches of trees that lined Jaffa Road. A head rolled onto the sidewalk near a pedestrian, Yigal Kara. A headless corpse lay on the street a few feet from the bus. A body had flown past Yitzhak Rubin, a ticket inspector, and landed fifty meters away. Inside his Mitsubishi van, which he stopped just to the right and behind the Number 18 as he waited for the traffic light on Sarei Yisraeli Street to change, Avi Huja felt the rush of hot air from the blast. He opened the door of his van and ran down the block, away from the burning bus. After collecting himself a few minutes later, Huja turned and ran back. As he approached the bus, he found a female soldier lying on the street, screaming in pain, with one of her legs blown off. Huja and another man wrapped a tourniquet on the woman’s leg to try to stop the bleeding, and then carried her to the sidewalk. Nearby, Arik Cohen, an Israeli Air Force corporal, stood in disbelief. Cohen had bee
n asleep in an apartment. He ran to the scene in his pajamas and found a police car smeared with blood and body parts scattered on the street.

  Flames licked the sides of the bus. Avi Rivivo, who happened to be walking by as the bomb detonated, tried to approach the bus but felt something odd under his feet. He looked down and noticed he was stepping on fingers and legs. “It was like entering the gates of hell,” he said later.

  A twenty-two-year-old Israeli soldier, Shmulik Avital, who had been riding on the bus behind the Number 18, leaped from his seat and scrambled out the door. As he tried to climb aboard the Number 18, though, he was stopped by a burst of black smoke. Momentarily blinded, he stepped back—then again tried to board the crippled bus. He dragged an injured woman from her seat, then returned to carry a soldier whose hair was on fire.

  Avital would be credited with carrying six people to safety. But after an hour, he collapsed on the sidewalk, crying and apologizing out loud for not being able to save more people. “What could I have done?” he said. “I’m only human. I’m only human.”

  David Sofer ran to the front door of the bus. Smoke still poured from the rear seats where the bomb had exploded.

  He climbed into the bus. The driver was still in his seat—dead. A woman, who seemed to have just paid her fare, had fallen over the driver—also dead.

  Sofer stepped over the woman and squeezed into the aisle between the seats and stopped and looked at the scene for a second or two. He could see the entire length of the bus now, all the seats, all the passengers.

  Many were still in their seats, “all sitting up,” he recalled.

  And they all seemed to be dead. All of them. No one screamed in pain. No one even seemed to be moaning.

  Sofer inched toward the back of the bus. More paramedics arrived on the scene now, many trying to climb into the bus and others just standing in shock as they surveyed the scene before them.

  Sofer tried to watch where he placed his feet. As he shimmied toward the back of the bus, he passed a woman in a seat. Her lips moved. Was she still alive? Sofer did not know. He reached down anyway and lifted the woman up, then turned, called to the paramedics outside the bus and handed the woman to them through a broken window.

  Sofer whirled and retraced his steps to the main door of the bus. As the paramedic who found the woman, it was his job to make sure she was placed in an ambulance and taken to the hospital. But as he followed the other paramedics who were carrying the woman to an ambulance, he passed the body of another woman laying face down on the sidewalk, about thirty yards from the bus.

  Sofer figured the woman was dead and that another paramedic had removed her from the bus and placed her on this patch of sidewalk. Or perhaps she had been walking along the sidewalk and had been hit by debris from the blast and had been killed.

  As Sofer walked by, he heard a gasp—a desperate attempt to breathe. He stopped and looked down. The woman on the sidewalk was trying to breathe. He heard another gasp, then a frantic gulping and sucking for air. Sofer bent over. He turned the woman over and called for stretcher.

  It was Leah Stein Mousa.

  She had been blown from the back door of the bus to this spot. Another paramedic ran up with a stretcher. Sofer and the other paramedic carefully lifted Mousa and placed her on the stretcher and carried her to an ambulance. The other paramedic slid into the driver’s seat of the ambulance and turned a key to start the engine. Sofer jumped into the back.

  Mousa was still breathing. Sofer hoped he could at least get her to a hospital.

  In the rear of the bus, silent, a young couple was still in the seats they took when they stepped onto the bus less than thirty minutes earlier.

  Matt and Sara.

  They were not moving.

  Ami Ayalon wanted to get to the office early. He had taken over the reins of Israel’s Shin Bet counterterror security agency only three days before. Sunday would be the start of his first full week on the job. A Shin Bet driver picked up Ayalon at his house near the northern Israeli port city of Haifa. As the car rolled south along a highway toward Tel Aviv, Ayalon monitored the radio and thought about his day ahead.

  One of Shin Bet’s duties was to protect Israeli’s highest ranking officials. It had been only four months since an Israeli extremist had shot and killed Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. And since the assassination, the agency had taken its share of criticism over whether it paid too much attention to Palestinian terrorists and had not monitored the activities of some Jewish extremists.

  As he rode in the car toward Tel Aviv, Ayalon expected he might be organizing plans to improve Shin Bet’s surveillance of the Israelis who were so opposed the peace process that Rabin had started with the Palestinians and Yasser Arafat that they might resort to violence against their own government. Just after 6:45 a.m., however, Ayalon heard a brief, but numbing report.

  Bomb explosion on a bus. Jaffa Road. Jerusalem. Many casualties.

  Ayalon told his driver to find the quickest road to Jerusalem. His morning office meetings could wait. Ayalon wanted to get to the scene of the explosion.

  In Ramallah, ten miles to the north of Jaffa Road, another man also monitored the radio. Hassan Salameh was not taking any phone calls. He knew he was about to become one of the most sought-after fugitives in Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. It was, he would say later, a role he happily embraced. And just after 6:45 a.m., Salameh heard the news he was hoping for. The bomb he had built the night before and had given to the young man from the refugee camp had worked. The Number 18 bus was on fire.

  Now Salameh waited for another piece of news.

  During the night before, at the rented apartment in Abu Dis, Salameh had assembled a second bomb. He also met with a second suicide bomber—another young Palestinian man from the West Bank. Just after the first bomber left in the blue Opel sedan for the bus stop on Jaffa Road, a second bomber was picked up by a Hamas operative in a white pickup truck and driven to the Israeli city of Ashkelon, not far from the border to the Gaza Strip. The second bomber wore a far different disguise than the young man who carried the bomb to the Jaffa Road bus. On instructions from Salameh, the second bomber dressed in the uniform of an Israeli soldier. His target was a bus stop near Ashkelon where Israeli soldiers often gathered in large numbers to await buses to military bases in southern Israel.

  Salameh knew the thirty-mile trip to Ashkelon would take longer. There were also more chances to get caught, perhaps in a random checkpoint set up by the Israeli police who might find something suspicious about the young man in the uniform of an Israeli soldier.

  Salameh had still not heard from the second bomber or from his driver.

  On the western edge of Jerusalem, another man also waited. As soon as he heard the news that a terrorist bomb had exploded on Jaffa Road, Dr. Avraham “Avi” Rivkind rushed to his post as chief trauma surgeon at Hadassah University Hospital Ein Kerem. Hadassah is so large that it has two branches in Jerusalem—the Ein Kerem hospital on the western side of the city and another complex atop Mount Scopus on Jerusalem’s eastern border overlooking the West Bank. On this day, it would have been quicker and shorter for ambulances to make the trip to Hadassah’s Mount Scopus branch. But Hadassah’s Ein Kerem complex had a more extensive trauma unit. It also had Avi Rivkind.

  Rivkind, a lanky man with an angular face and piercing eyes, knew the day ahead would be long. He also knew the casualties could be numerous and gruesome. Rivkind began his career several decades before as an Israeli army surgeon. He did not expect to become one of the world’s foremost experts in treating victims of bombings or shootings. That expertise was thrust upon him, first in patching up Israeli soldiers who had been wounded in his nation’s wars, then in caring for the steady stream of civilians—Israeli and Palestinian—who had been injured in terrorist bombings or shootouts. He knew from personal experience what a bullet from a semiautomatic AK47 or M16 could do t
o human flesh when it ripped through a body. He also knew how even the smallest pieces of shrapnel could cut through muscle and bone.

  As a reminder of the kind of wounds he had learned to deal with, Rivkind kept an array of small screws, ball bearings and nails in a plastic medicine bottle on the desk of his hospital office—pieces of shrapnel that he had removed from the legs, arms, abdomens and heads of soldiers and civilians who had been brought to his trauma unit. Rivkind also knew that treating victims of terrorist attacks, especially bombings, was not like other doctor-patient relationships. There was little time for one-on-one consultation, little bedside manner. Decisions about which patients to treat first and how to treat them were made quickly, instinctively. Large teams of physicians and nurses were needed, and Rivkind took pride in knowing how to organize his teams to care for mass numbers of casualties. But he could never master one part of that preparation. “You can not prepare yourself emotionally,” he said. “Every time there is a terrorist bombing, there is a chance that one of the victims will be someone you know.”

  Soon after arriving at the hospital, Rivkind ordered his teams of doctors and nurses to assemble by the driveway that led to the Hadassah Ein Kerem’s emergency room. He listened for the sirens and waited.

  Several miles away, as he rode in the back of the ambulance, David Sofer knew he had to make a crucial decision. On the stretcher, Leah Stein Mousa, her face blackened by fire and her clothes streaked by greasy soot, was breathing heavily now—gasping even more desperately for air. Her pulse began to drop.

  Sofer knew that the best place for Mousa was Hadassah Ein Kerem—and Avi Rivkind’s team of trauma experts. But the hospital was still a ten-minute ride. Sofer sensed that Mousa might die on the roads to Hadassah.

  He looked up and yelled to the ambulance driver.

  “Let’s go to Shaare Zedek,” Sofer said, referring to another of Jerusalem’s hospitals.