Khalil Abu-Olbeh has been ferrying Palestinian workers to Israel from the Gaza Strip for the past five years - a dependable employee of Israel's Egged bus company.
Aged 35, a resident of Gaza's Sheikh Radwan district, he is married with five children. He has no record of violent activism against Israel, and no known ties to Hamas, Islamic Jihad or other Palestinian extremist groups.
Each year, before being given his permit to enter Israel from Gaza, he has undergone " security checks" with the General Security Service, or "Shin Bet", Israel's domestic intelligence agency. His most recent clearance was issued just weeks ago.
In the course of the bloody recent years of Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Shin Bet has built up what it calls "profiles" of likely enemies of the state, those Palestinians who are deemed to constitute the gravest threat to security. According to intelligence sources, these profiles indicate that potential attackers are relatively young, unmarried or childless, with a history of militant activism and known contacts with the Islamic extremists. Mr Abu-Olbeh, it can hardly be denied, fits none of these criteria.
And that, for Israel, is what makes yesterday's bloody incident at a bus-stop south of Tel Aviv, when the bus driven by Abu-Olbeh ploughed into a crowd of soldiers and civilians, killing eight of them, particularly troubling. The Shin Bet and the Israeli army had been on full alert, amid innumerable reports of plans by Hamas and the other extremist groups to hit targets in Israel.
The fear was, and is, of a suicide bombing at just such a crowded location, or a car bombing like the one in Jerusalem's Meah Shearim district earlier this month. But no amount of security precautions, no amount of intelligence information, would have identified Mr Abu-Olbeh as a potential threat. He was a trustworthy Palestinian, dutifully transporting the Gaza labourers to their various pick-up points inside Israel, a proven employee.
In Gaza yesterday, while AbuOlbeh lay in a Tel Aviv hospital, wounded by the policeman's bullet that had prevented his bid to escape with his bus into Gaza, hordes of locals converged on the family home, with some of the youngsters openly applauding the Israeli deaths.
His family issued none of the "victory" statements commonly heard in the homes of Palestinian suicide bombers after their attacks have taken place, but neither did any of his relatives attempt to assert - as had the Palestinian Authority President, Mr Yasser Arafat - that yesterday's incident was an unremarkable road accident.
Accepting the assumption that his brother had deliberately crashed into the Israeli crowd, Mr Hussein Abu-Olbeh speculated that he had been pushed to despair by the daily toll of death in the past 4-1/2 months, when Palestinians have been dying at an average rate of three a day. It particularly grieved him, said Hussein, that so many children were dying. He was, at the best of times, a nervous man, Hussein added. And his mood had not been helped by the fact that, because Israel has so limited the number of Gazans it has been allowing into the country to work, he had been unemployed for long periods recently.
Israel's response to yesterday's deaths has been predictable: it has closed off Gaza, and the West Bank, altogether. The border crossings to Egypt and Jordan are now shut, as is Gaza's international airport. And, for the time being at least, there will be no Palestinians from Gaza crossing into Israel to work.