A hundred yards up the highway, Havi Negav, 45, pulled his motor scooter behind a southbound bus heading toward the soldiers. “The road was empty, and he was going slowly,” Negav remembers. “I tried to pass him, and suddenly, he gathered great speed.” As Negav watched in horror, the bus veered off the four-lane highway and plowed into the waiting troops at 50 miles an hour, knocking them over like bowling pins.

“Everyone was screaming,” Negav says. “There was blood everywhere. You could see heads and other body parts lying on the road.” Sami Adato, 19, on his way to work with his father, pulled up to the scene moments later. “I saw a blond female soldier lying on the ground, with her face bruised and her eyes open. One shoe was gone, and her clothes were torn off her body. I tried to help her, but she was gone.” Recalls eyewitness Meir Haim, 73: “The injured soldiers were calling out, ‘mother,’ ‘father’ as they lay in the road. It was a catastrophe.”

The hit-and-run attack at Azur Junction, carried out by a Gaza Palestinian bus driver with a valid permit to work in Israel, left seven Israeli soldiers and one civilian dead and another 18 injured. It was the worst single act of terror since the Al-Aqsa intifada began nearly five months ago-and indeed, the largest death toll in a terrorist attack in Israel since the bombing of the Mahane Yehuda market in Jerusalem in 1996. Israelis reacted with fear and outrage. Outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Barak condemned the hit-and-run attack as “abominable,” and convened an emergency meeting of his security staff to discuss countermeasures and possible strikes in Gaza. Incoming Israeli leader Ariel Sharon, who crushed Barak in the Feb. 6 election by pledging to bring security to Israel, called the attack a “terrible crime” and said it demonstrated that Palestinians made no distinction between Jewish settlements in Israeli-occupied territories and “the heart of Israel.” Israeli officials theorized that the attack could have been in retaliation for Monday’s assassination by Israeli forces of Masoud Ayad, 54, a commander of Yasir Arafat’s elite Force 17 security force in Gaza in what Barak hailed as a “preventive operation.” But the bus driver’s brother, in an interview, said that his brother acted “out of love for his people” not out of revenge for Monday’s killing. (This afternoon, Arafat publicly described the killings as a “road accident.”)

Police identified the attacker as Khalil Abdu Elba, 35, a married father of five who had worked for the Egged bus company, Israel’s largest transport company, for the past five years. Abdu Elba regularly transported workers from Gaza to the Tel Aviv area and had dropped off a busload of 54 Palestinians at around 3 o’clock Tuesday morning. Abdu Elba was supposed to park his vehicle for the day at an Egged bus depot, a company spokesman said, and wait there for the return trip to the Gaza Strip in the late afternoon. But Abdu Elba never made it to the depot. Instead, he took his lethal detour down Route 44, then led police helicopters and an Israeli taxi driver on a high-speed chase down the highway. After smashing into a heavy truck at Gan Yavne Junction 25 minutes down the road, he stopped the bus and was shot by Israeli police. Taken to a hospital in the town of Rehovot, he had a leg amputated and is now reported to be in serious condition and under heavy guard.

Was Abdu Elba working alone? This morning, Ifi-din el-Kasam, the military wing of Hamas, took credit for the attack in an anonymous call to a radio station. But nobody has linked the driver to any terrorist groups in Gaza, and another brother said in an interview today that Abdu Elba had no connection to either Hamas or the Tanzim, Palestinian paramilitary units affiliated with Arafat’s Fatah organization. The brother, Hussein Abu Elba, said he believed his brother had carried out the attack independently, acting out of outrage at the death of Palestinian children in clashes with the Israeli army. Hussein Abu Elba said that “we were surprised to hear that [Khalil] had carried out the attack. What he did is a natural thing for any Palestinian who lives with his people and sees his brothers being killed.” Israel Police Chief Shalom Aharonishky said that the driver had passed stringent security checks by the Shin Bet secret service. “The driver has worked on this line for more than five years,” he said, “and I want to stress that despite all the warnings and the precautions and deployments and all the operations by all the security forces, there is no way to prevent an incident like this 100 percent. But we will continue to do our best.” An Egged spokesman reiterated that, like all Egged drivers permitted to travel from Gaza to Israel, Abdu Elba had an impeccable background. “They are all over 30 years old, with families. It seems inconceivable that any of them would do anything unexpected like such a suicide attack.”

Today’s attack is certain to intensify pressure on incoming Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to take drastic action against the terrorist threat. Hours after the killings, hundreds of enraged Israelis demonstrated and tried to block roads near the bus stop at Azur Junction near Holon. SHARON STAND BY YOUR PROMISE, read one sign. BRING US SECURITY NOW. Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, the deputy prime minister and candidate for the Labor Party leadership, said that the West Bank and Gaza should be hermetically sealed and that “this closure must maintained until further notice.” Ben-Eliezer endorsed Sharon’s campaign pledge that all negotiations with Arafat be broken off until the Palestinians agree to renounce violence. “The Palestinians must have it explained to them once and for all that the choice is between the negotiating table and war in the field of their choosing,” he told Israeli Radio on Tuesday morning.

For now, Israel is mourning its latest victims of terror. Six female and one male soldiers, all of them between 18 and 21 years old, will be buried across Israel tonight and tomorrow. Among them: Julie Weiner, 21, who fled Israel for France with her parents during the first intifada in 1989 but made aliyah (religious return to Israel) alone four months ago, against their wishes. Those who survived the attack say they’ll never forget the sight of their young friends lying dead in the road. “I watched them die, and there was nothing I could do,” said a 19-year-old soldier who identified himself only as Moshe. “The bus came like a wave in the sea and just covered them.” Now, the Palestinians can only wait for the next round of vengeance to wash over them.