Survivors try to make sense of attack

Bombing of Jerusalem bus stuns witnesses, wounded

By PETER HERMANN / SUN FOREIGN STAFF

Survivors try to make sense of attack — The Baltimore Sun, 23 February 2004 — The Baltimore Sun · Baltimore, MD · 23 February 2004

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Transcribed from the clipping

JERUSALEM — Five months ago, Alice Eizenkot had just dropped off her two teen-age daughters at dance class on Emek Rafaim Street when a Palestinian suicide bomber blew up a cafe about 100 yards from where she was standing. Eight people died.

Yesterday, Eizenkot had left her daughters at their school and was in her car, at the other end of the same street, when a bus behind her blew up at a stoplight. She stopped her car in the middle of the road but didn't look back. "I knew it was an explosion, and I knew it was the bus," she said, trembling in a bed at Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus an hour after the attack.

"I didn't want to see anything. My children called, and they didn't believe that I had survived." [...] Abed Issa, a 42-year-old laborer from East Jerusalem, was on his way to a bank to cash a check so he could buy food for his wife and five children. He was pushing his way toward the center of the bus when the bomb exploded.

"There was so much blood we had to wipe it from our eyes," Issa said at the hospital as he dabbed a gash above his left eye with a piece of gauze. Issa, who works as a gardener and cleans floors at a medical clinic on Emek Rafaim, shrugged off the politics behind the blast. "What does it matter, Arab or Jew?" he said. "You just don't do things like this.

We are all from the same place, from the same God. My only war is providing bread for my children."

How this transcription was made

Date confirmed on the page (folio).

Context added by this archive

Folio reads "Page 6A : Monday, Feb. 23, 2004 : The Sun" — the date agrees with Maria's label. Photo caption: "Volunteers retrieve a body from the scene of a Palestinian suicide bombing on a packed bus in west Jerusalem. The bomber killed eight people, and at least 60 others were injured." Credit: AVI OHAYON : AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE.

The paper's spelling "teen-age" and "Yedioth Ahronoth" are left as printed. This clipping is worth keeping on its own merits rather than as an Eisenkot record: it gives a wounded Palestinian labourer from East Jerusalem a named, quoted presence in a US daily's account of an Israeli bus bombing, and puts his words in display type.

Cite this clipping

"Survivors try to make sense of attack," The Baltimore Sun, 23 February 2004, p. 6A. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2004-050. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2004-050