ISRAEL: With his hands bloodied from his efforts to rescue survivors of yesterday's suicide bomb on a crowded Jerusalem bus, Mr Nir Barkat's thoughts turned to today's hearing in the Hague on Israel's controversial West Bank barrier.
"I have to tell you the world has double standards because life is less important than quality of life for some people," said the Jerusalem councillor, referring to Palestinian grievances against the fence, which Israel insists will prevent such terrorist attacks in the future.
"When you see how people get blown to pieces, with arms and hands everywhere, I think protecting life is more important than anything else." Mr Barkat was sitting at traffic lights in his car when a 23-year-old Palestinian suicide bomber from the West Bank city of Bethlehem detonated an explosion at around 8.30 a.m. on the number 14 bus, killing eight people and wounding up to 60 people.
The blast blew out side windows from the vehicle, punched a hole in its roof, and sent body parts flying through the air. Mr Barkat said he quickly parked his car in the forecourt of a nearby petrol station and rushed to help rescue survivors from the charred wreckage.
"I had to step on parts of bodies to get people out of the bus," said Mr Barkat, glancing down at his black shoes still smeared with blood.
"Lots of people were terribly wounded and totally shocked. Some of them were bleeding badly, so had to stop the bleeding until the emergency services came. It's unbelievable when you see pieces of bodies spread all over, internal organs, hands and feet, it's a terrible sight."
The bomb, which police at the scene described as a medium- sized device packed with metal shards, was detonated as the bus idled at traffic lights at a busy junction close to the city centre.
Yesterday was the start of the working week here, and the passengers were mostly commuters from south Jerusalem.
A security agent had boarded the bus a few stops before the explosion, checked it and then got off, a passenger, told Israeli army radio. It was unclear if the bomber, Mohammed Zaal, had been on the bus at the time.
The militant group, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, part of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction, claimed responsibility for the bombing in a statement that called the barrier "a Nazi wall which will not stop us attacking."
It said the attack was a reaction to the barrier and to an Israeli army raid that killed 15 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip on February 11th, 2004.
While rescue workers ferried away the last of the human remains in white plastic sheeting and scraped the last small shards of flesh off the ground, garage attendant Mr Ra'ed Shueiki (23) sat in his office being comforted by colleagues and smoking cigarettes.
Mr Shueiki, who lives from the northern Jerusalem Arab neighbourhood of Shuafat, was attending to a customer in the forecourt of the garage when the blast occurred several feet from where he stood.
"I was filling gas and I felt something shaking and then I heard a huge blast and the bus windows blew out and I saw glass and hands flying out to the street," he said. Somebody told him to run and he ran. One of his colleague was wounded in face and hands and was brought to hospital. Asked how, as an Arab, he felt about the attack, he leaned forward on the desk wringing his hands. Then, in Arabic, he replied: "I have no words." Minutes later he was brought in a wheelchair to a nearby ambulance.