The Palestinian Islamic Jihad has claimed responsibility for an attack in occupied east Jerusalem, in which two were killed, and the Palestinian Authority has as usual condemned the killing of civilians as an unacceptable form of national struggle against occupation.
According to AFP, bus No. 25 was packed with people returning from work and from shopping trips on Sunday afternoon when rush hour traffic slowed it to a crawl at an intersection in occupied east Jerusalem's French Hill neighborhood.
Some glanced out the back windows and saw a 24-year-old Palestinian, Hatem Yanin Shueiki, pointing an M-16 automatic rifle at them.
"I saw him and he wouldn't stop shooting," said Mazel Amslem, a 44-year-old who was trapped on the back of the bus by the hail of bullets, but who escaped unhurt.
Minutes later two of the passengers, including a 16-year-old girl, were dead and 35 others had been injured, four of them seriously, and 10 more were taken to hospital to be treated for shock.
Shueiki, from the West Bank town of Hebron, fired first at the back of the red and white bus, shattering the windows.
A young soldier on board said passengers started screaming and dropped to the floor.
The bus was stuck in the traffic on a road through a Jewish area of mainly Arab east Jerusalem that has become notorious in recent months for shooting attacks.
Shueiki then hurried round to the left side of the bus and unleashed another three staccato bursts which echoed though the valley.
Some of the passengers looked up and saw the driver slumped over the wheel.
Then there was a click. The gunman had emptied the magazine of the assault rifle which can hold dozens of bullets, police said.
Two border patrol guards stationed at the intersection opened fired and shot him dead.
A nearby soldier and a civilian with a gun also took shots at Shueiki.
Ambulances and police cars screeched toward the scene, sirens wailing.
Helicopters flew overhead to look for two other Palestinians who witnesses said fled the scene.
Police said they later found leaflets for the Islamic Jihad militant group in Shueiki's pocket. The group later claimed responsibility for the attack as their latest "martyr operation."
An anonymous telephone caller also told a Bethlehem television the larger Islamic resistance movement Hamas was behind the attack.
The passengers, who could, stumbled off the bus and lay down on the pavement. Others wandered around in shock, not aware of the fact that they were hurt, witnesses said.
A handful of people who were nearby ran over to help.
"I heard four long bursts of gunfire," said Zeve Erez, 26, a security guard and a political science student, who was one of the first on the scene to help the wounded.
His white tee-shirt was stained with blood and his eyes were red and dazed.
"I saw the bus on the road, I saw a lot of people, some of them sitting on the pavement crying and everything," he said.
"I went inside the bus and there were four injured people inside. We took them out the bus and put them on the road and started taking care of them," he said.
A medic from Israel's Magen David Adom ambulance service said one reason the attack was not a massacre was that the gunman had fired mostly at windows where he could see the eyes of the passengers. Had he shot lower he would have caused far more carnage, he said
Most of the wounded suffered only light injuries to their upper bodies.
Others, including a teenage girl, were not so lucky.
"There was a little girl about 14. She kept saying her hand was broken, her hand was broken," said one of the first medics to arrive.
"I said 'what else' and she said 'Nothing, just my hand.' So I took off her shirt, I saw three bullet holes in the back. When I took off her skirt I saw two more bullets. She lost a lot of blood and she probably had a lot of internal injuries. But she was yelling about her hand," he said.
PA CONDEMNS ATTACK
The Palestinian leadership condemned late Sunday the lethal attack .
"We strongly condemn the shooting on a civilian bus in Jerusalem, which left several victims," the Palestinian leadership said, after a meeting of the Palestinian cabinet and executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organisation.
Earlier Sunday, a Palestinian gunmen had sprayed a Jerusalem bus with bullets in east Jerusalem, killing two and injuring 35 others, before also being shot dead.
The Palestinian leadership vowed "to arrest and judge those responsible." – Albawaba.com
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
