One Israeli was killed and four injured when a suicide bomber blew himself up near a bus travelling just east of Tel Aviv yesterday.
But the death toll might have been much higher had the driver of the bus and a passenger not pinned the bomber to the ground, after they discovered he was wearing an explosive belt, and allowed passengers on the packed bus to flee.
In the Gaza Strip, two boys - one aged 12, the other 17 - were killed by Israeli fire during a raid by the military in the Rafah refugee camp early yesterday morning, Palestinians said. This brought to 20 the number of Palestinians who have been killed in clashes with the Israeli army in Gaza in the last five days.
The militant Islamic Hamas movement claimed responsibility for the suicide attack near Tel Aviv, in which the bomber was also killed. He was identified as Rafik H'mad (31), a father of four from a village near the West Bank town of Qalqilyah. The Israeli killed in the blast was identified as Se'ada Aharon (71), who died of her wounds after being evacuated to hospital.
The driver of the bus, Mr Baruch Neuman (50), said he had shut the door of the bus after seeing a man trying to sneak through the back door, knocking him on to the road. Fearing the man had hurt himself, and still unaware he was a suicide bomber, Mr Neuman got off the bus with another passenger to check him.
When they opened the bomber's shirt to examine him, they discovered the belt strapped to his body.
"We saw the wires. I was in shock. We each grabbed one of his hands [to stop him detonating the bomb]. I knew that if he blew himself up there would be a lot of dead people," said Mr Neuman.
After shouting to the passengers on the packed bus to flee, Mr Neuman and the passenger holding down the bomber then let go simultaneously and ran. The bomber then got up and ran about 30 metres toward a group of people at a bus stop and blew himself up.
Israeli and Palestinian officials blamed each other for the violence. An Israeli Foreign Ministry official said: "Palestinian terrorists have declared open season on Israelis."
A Palestinian cabinet minister, Mr Saeb Erekat, condemned all attacks on civilians, whether Israelis or Palestinians, but said he held the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon, "responsible for the current escalation". With the casualty count in yesterday's suicide attack low, however, Mr Sharon was not expected to launch a harsh military response to the bombing.
Meanwhile, in Gaza City a crowd of some 20,000 people, many of them armed police and militiamen, turned out yesterday for the funeral of a senior Palestinian policeman killed by Hamas gunmen earlier this week in the Strip. In clashes with Palestinian police after the incident, five Hamas supporters were killed.