posted by Richard Palmer

JERUSALEM—“What does peegooah mean?” I asked, though I’d already guessed the answer. A few moments earlier a journalist burst into Media Central, proclaiming there had been a peegooah on King David Street. Everyone immediately gathered around the computer, checking the Israeli news sites. Something big had obviously just happened.

“Peegooah, it means bomb, explosion,” came the reply. “There’s been an explosion outside the King David Hotel.”

Melissa, the other intern here at Media Central, and I grabbed a camera, notebook, pens and a wad of Media Central business cards and headed out the door. I didn’t know if there’d be much to see—I’d never been at the scene of a terrorist attack before—but it was worth checking out.

A combination of brisk walking and jogging brought us to King David Street, only half a mile or so away. The first thing we saw was the police and Israel Defense Forces (IDF) diverting traffic and setting up checkpoints a few blocks away from the attack.

I carried on walking; the police weren’t stopping pedestrians. Other reporters were rushing to the scene. I didn’t know exactly where the attack happened, so I was constantly looking out for signs of damage. After a couple more blocks the two of us arrived to a crowded area covered with glass. To our right stood a bus with its back smashed, and most of the windows along its side shattered.

The area didn’t look like a bomb had hit it. It was chaos, but not in a panicked sense. People scurried around in all directions, trying to accomplish their own tasks. Most of them seemed like curious onlookers, busy taking pictures with their cell phones. Expensive cameras and wadded notepads marked the more serious journalists. An ambulance sat parked next to the bus, and medics were gathering up the injured. A few minutes later it was on its way. More police cars and bikes arrived every minute. The police started setting up metal fences and barred people from walking down the rest of King David Street.

I took some pictures, and then Melissa and I started to find out what had happened. There were a couple of people sitting by the side of the road. They had no idea. Around the other side of the bus was another group of people, but none of them knew either.

Then a tall bearded man had attracted a pack of people with notepads. “What was it, what happened?” someone asked. He muttered something about a bulldozer hitting the bus. “Were you on the bus?”

“Yes.”

“How did it all start?”

That question was a mistake. “It all started at the president’s house. He invited the terrorist Abu Mazen (head of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas) to his house. Now the terrorists think they could do whatever they want.” A few reporters tried to stop his tirade, but he just kept repeating his line about the president and Abbas. The pack moved on, only two of us stayed to see if we could get anything more out of him.

Our perseverance yielded partial rewards. The attack was carried out by a man in a tractor. He hit the bus, and some people passed out. After yielding this nugget of information, the bearded man resumed his attack on President Shimon Peres, and I moved on. Another small crowd gathered around two women. One had been a passenger on the bus, but spoke only Hebrew. The other woman translated. From these two, a more complete picture emerged.

As the bus came out of Washington Street, a front-end loader hit it from behind. The driver, believing the bump to be accidental, slowed down. Instead of stopping, the Palestinian driver sped up and smashed into the side of the bus.

That was all our eyewitness told us before she headed back to her apartment, slipping through a police checkpoint on her way back. By the fact the bus was parked on a side road and the tractor was stopped a few blocks further down, I inferred that the bus had turned off the main road, while the digger kept going. A quick comparison of notes with other journalists confirmed this was true.

The rest of the digger’s path, by now, had been blocked off by the IDF, so we couldn’t get in to have a look (Mr. Stephen Flurry arrived later and was able to take pictures of the smashed cars, published on theTrumpet.com). So with the road sealed off, I had to make do with secondhand sources to get the rest of the story. An acquaintance of mine informed me that four cars had been crushed, but that no one had died. Another comparison of notes between a huddle of reporters revealed that 17 people had been injured, and that the attack stopped when the driver of the tractor was shot. None of us knew who killed him.

By this point a lot more journalists had crawled out of the woodwork. With no more eyewitnesses at hand, they asked anyone and everyone what had happened. I ended up getting interviewed for a British and Canadian radio channel for the information I collected. By this time, there was little more to be gleaned from staying on the scene. Melissa and I headed back to Media Central, where I began writing an article on what had happened.

We were about halfway home when the sound of an explosion stopped us in our tracks.

Normally, I wouldn’t have paid to much attention to it, but after coming from the scene of one terrorist attack, the sound was chilling. A phone beeped behind us. An American couple got a text from a friend of theirs. “It’s a bomb, in Ben Yehuda,” they stuttered.

Now that was scary. Ben Yehuda is a busy outdoor mall, near where Media Central is located. It’s been targeted by terrorists many times in the past few years. On a busy day, a terrorist wouldn’t need a very big explosion to kill a lot of people.

Two attacks within minutes—now this was big. Was this the start of some organized campaign of terror? We were about to run up to Ben Yehuda and find out what was going on, when the Americans behind us called their friend.

It wasn’t a bomb. The police had just exploded a suspicious package, that’s all. Just a routine event in a city that has seen so much violence.