The camera jostled past the crush of rescue workers, entered the bombed bus and paused on bloody pieces of flesh and a withered gray lung hanging from a twisted window frame. It moved to a severed right foot flung against a curb, then halted on an arm lying in the middle of the street.
For the first time in more than three years and after scores of suicide bombings, the Israeli government has taken the horror of a bus bombing directly to the public via a video on the Internet, bypassing what one senior Israeli official called the "distorted" coverage of the international news media.
"We decided this was the only way for us to bring our message to the world," said Gideon Meir, a senior Foreign Ministry officer. "It took us 31/2 years to show these pictures."
The decision to put the graphic five-minute, 38-second video on the Israeli Foreign Ministry Web site just hours after the Thursday morning explosion, which killed 11 people and the bomber, has unleashed an emotional public debate. Many Israelis are weary of a conflict that has turned buses, cafes and streets into targets and are increasingly frustrated with political leadership on both sides that has not stopped the violence.
Meir said the Web site had received 600,000 hits on the video as of Sunday night. On the day of the bombing, the site temporarily collapsed under the volume of attempts to view the footage, which carried the understated warning — "Caution: Video contains very graphic footage."
According to Meir, the government decided to air the footage because of a pending case before the International Court of Justice in The Hague over the legal aspects of the massive complex of walls, fences and trenches that Israel is building around and through the West Bank.
The Israeli government describes the project as a security fence that is needed to prevent suicide attacks. Palestinians and some international human rights organizations argue that it is an attempt to unilaterally establish a new border deep inside the West Bank and expropriate Palestinian land.
Meir said the government decision to put the footage on the Internet "was based on the fact that Israel is being taken to the International Court of Justice while Palestinians are perpetrating this barbaric terrorism."
That rationale outraged some opponents of the barrier project.
"Showing bodies or body parts ... lying on the ground and using it for political ends is disgusting," said Jeff Halper, who heads the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, an organization that monitors Israeli military actions against Palestinians. He accused the Israeli government of "trying to sell a certain political program, the wall, and to recruit the dead for this mission."
But some Israelis defended the government's decision. "Unfortunately this display was not introduced at an earlier stage," said Avraham Diskin, a political scientist at Jerusalem's Hebrew University. "The media presents these things in a sterile manner and it does not show you what happens in reality. I believe you should show the horror, put the truth on the table."
The video footage on the government Web site, www.mfa.gov.il, was taken by Ilan Sztulman, 45, who heads visual productions for the Foreign Ministry. He said he arrived at the scene of the Thursday attack only minutes after the blast.
"I get to the zone much faster than any other photographers because I have special permission to go in," Sztulman said. "Most of the journalists cannot go in until the bomb officers declare the area is bomb-free."
At Thursday's bombing, most journalists were kept more than 30 yards from the bus in the first minutes after the explosion. Many of the body parts videotaped by Sztulman had been collected by rescue workers by the time journalists were allowed to move closer. The 11th victim's body was so mutilated that the passenger, an Ethiopian woman, was not identified until this weekend using DNA tests.
"We've been documenting the terrorist attacks for a long time," Sztulman said, adding, "We classified this stuff as almost secret." Last summer, the Foreign Ministry's public affairs office showed one of its graphic videos to international journalists for the first time, but did not make the footage public.
Some of the most gruesome images from Thursday's bombing were edited out of the version now on the Foreign Ministry Web site, Sztulman said.
Even so, the footage remains jarring: Bodies, their appendages bruised and bloodied, lie at unnatural angles on the pavement; a pile of brains is partially covered by a piece of fabric; blood drips from flesh hanging on the bus window.
Sztulman also captured the intimate details that illustrate how the explosion shattered what began as an ordinary ride for dozens of passengers on Egged Bus No. 19. His camera recorded a black holy book still atop a sheaf of folders on one seat, a navy blue knapsack and silver mobile telephone tossed on the nearby pavement and a woman's leg in a black running shoe protruding into the bus aisle as though she were preparing to get up from her seat.
On Sunday, the Israeli military conducted a rare incursion into the West Bank city of Jericho, which has been largely immune from Israeli military operations during the current uprising, and imposed a curfew on the city, according to local residents and military officials. Israeli soldiers killed a man whom Palestinian security officials identified as a member of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an offshoot of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement. Israeli military officials said troops shot the man after he opened fire when soldiers tried to arrest him.
Researchers Samuel Sockol and Hillary Claussen contributed to this article.
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A4100-2004Feb1.htmlE-mail this article