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Passenger Shamir said he took the pistol of one of the terrorists lying near him, apparently wounded, and shot two others who were firing from the front of the bus at the police outside. "Meanwhile," he said, "another terrorist behind me fired at me and my daughter. The terrorists near me took out four hand grenades and dropped them in the bus. I shouted: 'Escape! Escape!' The bus was in flames. My daughter was hit again. Outside, there was a terrorist who was firing at everybody who was escaping from the bus. A few managed to escape. Some were caught in the fire." Later, 25 charred bodies were found in the bus.
TIME's Halevy managed to get past the Israeli guards and observe the shooting and explosions at first hand. Reports he: "I finally got close enough to the bus to see at least five bodies burning inside. The rear windows were blasted out and the barrel of a machine-gun was poking out. A child aged seven or eight was lying on the asphalt, a bullet hole in its head. Three women in a nearby ditch screamed for help. I helped them limp to waiting ambulances. A young couple emerged from the ditch screaming, 'We had two children in the bus.' The woman was hysterical. 'Where are my children, my children?' she cried. The husband was steely calm. 'If my children are dead,' he said with eerie softness, 'I'll kill all the Arabs in the world.' "
Six terrorists and one Israeli policeman died in the action. Coincidentally, Shaul Weizman, 26, the son of Defense Minister Ezer Weizman, who was later called home from a visit to Washington because of the attack, happened to be walking along the beach with an army colonel in the area of the gun battle. Weizman and the colonel grabbed their weapons (it is not unusual for Israelis to carry weapons) and helped capture two of the terrorists. By that time, heavily armed Israeli troops had moved into the region in force. Police clamped a curfew on northern Tel Aviv and launched an intensive man hunt for three commandos who were still missing.
News of the attack broke in Israel just as Deputy Chief of the U.S. Mission Richard Viets delivered Anwar Sadat's reply to Premier Begin's last letter. Begin made no immediate comment about Israeli response to the terrorist attack. But at a press conference in New York before taking off for Israel, Defense Minister Weizman admitted that retaliatory air strikes in southern Lebanon were "a possibility." That, of course, has been the pattern in the past, and Israel might well seize on the provocation as an excuse to put into action a plan to knock out encampments of the 5,000 Palestinians dug in near the border area.