Israeli driver Yaakov Cohen raced against time after he saw the bus ahead of his explode in a ball of flame and had a premonition his own vehicle would soon be next.
“I saw the first explosion and thought, my God, I’ve got to get out of here. I drove [my bus] about 10 meters and then opened the doors,” he said from his hospital bed in the southern city of Beersheba, where he was being treated for leg wounds.
“I believe that between 10 to 15 people got off my bus. Suddenly I heard a huge explosion. I can’t explain it but it was almost as if I knew it was going to happen. It was terrible, terrible... I don’t want to describe what I saw.”
Police said two Palestinian suicide bombers blew themselves up in near-simultaneous explosions -- one on Cohen’s crowded bus and the other on the bus travelling ahead of his along the main road of the desert town on a sun-baked Tuesday afternoon.
At least 15 people were killed and dozens wounded in the blasts.
Cohen said there had been 20 to 30 people still waiting to leave his vehicle when the bomb went off.
Nobody looked suspicious
None of the passengers who boarded his bus earlier had looked suspicious. “Believe me, I look and check,” Cohen said. “It is very hard to identify a bomber... I don’t know how anyone can.”
The bombings shattered a five-month lull in suicide attacks in Israel and were the first in the sprawling southern city of drab apartment blocks.
Beersheba, which means “well of seven” in Hebrew, is where the Bible says the patriarch Abraham won water rights in a peace treaty with Abimelech, king of Gerar.
A box of cookies, a bottle of apple juice and packages of matzo ball soup littered the ground around the two smoldering skeletons of the buses, 75 meters apart.
Emergency workers said the buses had been packed with passengers on their way home from Beersheba’s open-air market.
“I saw terrible things. Two bodies were hanging from a window,” said Moshe Zilstein, an emergency worker who was among the first at the scene. “I was inside the (first) bus taking off bodies when I heard the second explosion.”
On the back of one of the buses, one word was still visible on a banner advertisement shattered by the explosion.
“Shalom,” peace, it said.