THE MIDDLE EAST: David Horowitz describes the horror at the scene of the latest suicide bombing in Jerusalem
Amit Maliah, a driver with Israel's Egged bus company, was slightly late for work yesterday morning, so his colleague, Rahamim Tsidkiyahu, went out on his 32A bus instead.
As Mr Maliah, now driving the next bus along the same route, neared the top of the hill that leads down from Jerusalem's southern Gilo neighbourhood toward the city centre, he and his passengers heard an almighty boom: Mr Tsidkiyahu's bus, at the bottom of the hill, had been blown up.
"All my passengers were panicking," said Mr Maliah, who has worked for Egged for 12 years. "Some of them were parents who feared for their children, whom they thought were on the bus ahead.
Rahamim's bus had been pretty full," said Mr Maliah. Some children, hurrying to school, had apparently squeezed in while their parents waited for the next bus.
Mr Tsidkiyahu did not survive the horrific suicide-bombing. Along with 18 of his passengers, he was killed by the bomber, who detonated his explosives - packed with screws and ball-bearings - near the entrance to the bus, at that stop by the bottom of the hill.
Rescue workers found the driver, still with his hands on the steering wheel, dead in his seat, as blood trickled down the steps by the door.
The white and red bus was reduced to a shell, its roof ripped away, every window smashed. And its passengers, every single one of them, according to police, was either killed or injured.
The dead were laid out under black plastic on stretchers, on the pavement just across from the mangled wreck of the vehicle in which they had perished. Almost all of them came from the Gilo neighbourhood.
Some of the casualties were, indeed, kids on their way to school. "We're checking to see if all our pupils have arrived," said Ruth Elmaliach, who teaches at the school adjacent to the bus stop. "We fear that they have not."
"There were bodies piled up near the door," said Shalom Sabag, who was driving a car in front of the bus as it exploded and who dashed to help. "I took off the bodies of two girls and a man. There was one girl I cannot forget. She had a long braid down her back and she lay on her stomach."
Shlomi Calderon, who was driving a small lorry alongside the bus, having just dropped off his two children at kindergarten, said his vehicle was hit by parts of the bus, and that he saw at least two bodies blown out of the back windows.
Hospitalised with minor injuries, he said the scene was "indescribably horrible".
At the city's Hadassah Hospital, the head nurse in the emergency room had a "sixth sense" that the bombing was imminent, and began to lay out equipment, even before the sirens started wailing.
Her sixth sense was reinforced by an official alert: Police had taken the unusual step on Monday night of issuing a specific warning that a bomber had made his way to the city and was poised to strike.
So devastating was the force of the blast, so drastic the impact on the passengers, that as of late yesterday afternoon, only a few of the bodies had been conclusively identified - 51-year-old Mr Tsidkiyahu's among them.
But the families already knew that their loved ones were lost despite the lack of positive identification from the hospitals.
The bombed bus had been dragged away from the scene of the blast.
Most of the blood had been hosed away.
Small knots of demonstrators had gathered to chant "Death to the Arabs".
And they, the bereaved, were waiting at the national forensic centre for the bitter confirmation.