At dawn one day last week, a bus pulled out of the stockade at Elath, Israel's southernmost outpost and single Red Sea port. It headed north into the Negeb desert, toward Beersheba and civilization, wheezing and jogging for hours through the cratered wasteland that comprises half of Israel. The 15 passengers chatted and compared souvenirs. Outside, vultures wheeled in the pale sky.
The bus reached treacherous Scorpion's Pass, 60 miles south of Beersheba, and started up the grade like a clumsy beetle. As it neared a stone monument, erected to honor the Jews who fell in 1948 to win the Negeb, it was struck by a volley of gunfire. Ephraim Fuerstenberg, the driver, slumped dead; the bus rolled to a stop. Four passengers raced wildly through the door; a second burst spat from a hillock, and they fell lifeless onto the bleached clay. A bottle of cologne broke in the pocket of Hanna Kirshenbaum, 29, mother of three, and mingled the scent of flowers with her blood.
"I Played Dead." Two khaki-clad Arabs raced for the bus, leaped inside and sprayed it with Tommy guns. A soldier saved Ephraim's five-year-old daughter by throwing himself across her body, but he was riddled. Then the Arabs grabbed revolvers and fired into anything that twitched. "I played dead," said Miriam Lesser, a waitress. "One of the Arabs dragged me up by my hair to see if I was alive, then shot at my head but missed." A moment later, the assassins were gone.
Behind them they left eleven dead and a woman and a child critically wounded. Three shammed death. For a long time they dared not move because they heard noises. Later they learned that the sounds had been made by a dying man's feet drumming the bus floor in his last agony. Ephraim's daughter whimpered a few times; her father and mother were dead. The vultures were swooping lower and lower when an army truck twisted up the road and onto the terrible scene.
Once again—as it does almost every day—blood flowed in mockery of the state of affairs that diplomats call the Palestine truce. But not since Kibya, where, last October, Israeli invaders killed 53 Jordan Arabs, had the truce been bloodied so violently.
All Israel erupted in anger. The Israeli Cabinet met in emergency session. Ex-Premier David Ben-Gurion came out of retirement in the Negeb and conferred with his successor, Moshe Sharett, and the Israeli army chiefs. At dawn the next day, U.N. observers and Israelis led three police-trained dogs to the scene, let them sniff deeply of a black knitted Arab cap found behind the war memorial, and gave them their heads. By nightfall the baying hounds had reached a point six miles from the Jordan border. "Investigations are not complete, and this case cannot be prejudged," said a U.S. officer of the Armistice Command. But the trail was proof enough for Israel's government that the deed had been done by Arabs from Jordan. Israel officials summoned the U.N.'s truce-supervision chief, Major General Vagn Bennike, demanded "drastic measures," and insisted, "You must bring the Jordan government to task."