He held up his palms to the crowd. They were red with blood. As the mob bayed, a body clad only in grey underpants shot through the corner window of the Ramallah police station. It left a smear of blood on its descent.
With that, Israel and the Palestinians were effectively at war. In the tense moments before Israel exacted its retribution, witnesses described the scenes of horror in which at least two Israeli soldiers died at the hands of a Palestinian lynch mob. It was unclear exactly how many soldiers there were, who they were or how their car had arrived in such a dangerous location at such a sensitive time.
As the Israelis arrived at the police station yesterday morning, a crowd of more than 1,000 people was collecting around the corner at Ramallah's grand mosque for the double funeral of two men killed by Israeli soldiers.
This was a crowd on the edge of reason, fired up by the bloody images on official television, by the martial music pounding out of radio stations and by the faces of dead Palestinians staring out from posters plastered all over town.
Yesterday's was a mob hungry for bloody revenge.
An Israeli military spokesman said the dead men were army reservists in plain clothes who were sent to reinforce the defences of Beit El, a Jewish settlement north of Ramallah. They were administrative officers reporting for duty straight from their homes, he said.
"On the way to the base, they literally got lost," said Capt Natan Gold. They were apprehended by Palestinian police at one of the checkpoints they control near the centre of town. "Instead of being turned back at the Palestinian checkpoint, they were forced to go to the station."
Mr Nachman Shai, an Israeli government spokesman, held the Palestinian leader, Mr Yasser Arafat, directly responsible for their fate. "There is no doubt that the Palestinian Authority was involved and there is no doubt that the Palestinian mob was given a free hand to do whatever it wanted," he said.
"That shows by itself the character of people that we deal with and. . . it shows that Yasser Arafat is doing everything he can in order to put the entire Middle East on fire," he said.
But outside the police station in Ramallah people were convinced that the two men had been members of an elite Israeli army undercover unit, feared for its night raids on villages. They said their car had pulled up at a local Quaker school and that the men sat for a few minutes fiddling with electronic equipment.
But no matter who the Israeli men were, and how they got to the police station on Nablus street, they were doomed.
In more peaceful times Israeli troops apprehended inside Palestinian-ruled areas would have been handed over without incident. But this time the Israelis did not have a chance. Within moments of their capture word spread throughout Ramallah that four Israeli soldiers were inside the police station. Perhaps 2,000 men, some firing in the air, began swarming around the station. They came from the funeral, and from the heart of Ramallah, Manara square.
Inside the blue gates the Palestinian police mounted the wall, automatic weapons at the ready. But they were no contest for the mob. Screaming "Death to the Jews," and "Don't betray us, hand them over," they surged in waves towards the station, brandishing guns, knives and iron bars. "You could not count the people. They were just pushing, pushing forward towards the station," said one witness. "By this point, the rabble was controlling everything."
Fuelled by hate the mob stampeded through the gates and young men began scaling the walls of the station and overhanging trees. The police did not even fire in the air. Moments later a man appeared at the corner window, raising his blood-stained hands in triumph.
One man was dumped out of the window. Then, witnesses said, three others were dragged out by the mob, leaving dark streaks of blood on the pavement. With their t-shirts pulled over their heads, they were frogmarched towards the main square. Some witnesses said the men were passed from hand to hand over the heads of their captors as the mob made a victory procession around the stone lions of Manara square. Others said the men were stabbed and their bodies burnt .
Eventually two bodies were handed over to Israeli forces. They were burnt and severely mutilated, an army spokesman said. "Use your apocalyptic imagination to figure out what they looked like," said a spokesman.
In Ramallah, meanwhile, a deep sense of dread descended as the Palestinians awaited Israel's inevitable retribution.
Gunmen began to hunt down and beat reporters and television cameramen, and police appeared with loudspeakers, ordering people to return to their homes.