MIDDLE EAST CRISIS: Every Friday, in a scene that is mirrored outside supermarkets all over the city, two middle-aged Palestinian women sit themselves down cross-legged on the sidewalk outside the Supersol grocery in southwest Jerusalem's Kiryat Yovel neighbourhood, and sell homegrown parsley to Israeli passers-by.
Early yesterday afternoon, a young Palestinian woman, later to be named as Aayat Akhras, went over to the pair and spoke briefly to them. According to an eyewitness, they quietly gathered their belongings together and walked briskly away.
Then Akhras made her way to the supermarket entrance. The guard on the door, whom shoppers said later had been extremely conscientious in searching them all as they entered, stopped her and began questioning her. Evidently realizing that she was not going to be allowed into the crowded store, Akhras detonated the explosive charge she was carrying - killing herself, the security guard, and another Israeli who had the fatal misfortune to be standing nearby; more than 30 Israelis were hospitalised.
The second female suicide bomber to have been recruited by militants from Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction of the PLO, Akhras, it turned out, had paused by the parsley saleswomen to warn them: make yourselves scarce, I'm about to carry out a bombing.
Police had been warning for the past couple of days that they had "hard information" about an imminent suicide attack in Jerusalem - and had concentrated forces at synagogues, cafes, cinemas and shopping malls. Supermarkets were apparently lower down the list of presumed targets.
News of the "success" of Akhras - a 21-year-old who lived in Bethlehem's Dehaishe refugee camp - brought some local residents out on to the streets to celebrate. Sweets were distributed; rounds of gunfire were directed heavenward. In her "farewell" video, Akhras said her act of killing was also directed at Arab leaders who met for summit talks in Beirut last week - and sat idly by "while Palestinian women" battled to end the Israeli occupation.
At around the same time, in the centre of Jerusalem, Israeli police burst on to the Temple Mount, and used stun grenades to disperse Palestinian youths who were stoning a police position and had thrown stones, too, at Jewish worshippers at the Western Wall below.
The two deaths in Kiryat Yovel brought to 30 the toll of Israeli civilians killed within 48 hours - 24 of them inside Israel, and the other six in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The death toll in Wednesday night's suicide bombing of Netanya's Park Hotel has risen to 22, with several of the injured still in serious condition; four members of one family - Rachel and David Gavish, their son Avraham and his grandfather, Yitzhak Kaner, a settler pioneer - were shot dead in their home at the West Bank settlement of Elon Moreh, near Nablus, by a Hamas gunman on Thursday night; and two Israeli men in their 70s were stabbed to death at the Netzarim settlement in Gaza where they visiting relatives yesterday.