As bystanders in the street outside look on in horror, our gunman then reloads his weapon and sprays the bus with yet more fire, injuring 20 people. He approaches a woman huddled beneath a seat, trying to hide from him, lowers the gun to her head and pulls the trigger. The magazine is empty. As he tries to load a third clip, she grabs the burning barrel of the gun while other passengers rush him.

Seeing their chance, the onlookers storm the bus and fuelled by a mixture of passions -- fury, indignation and fear of further attack -- they beat the gunman to death.

As the news breaks, Israeli TV prefers to continue its coverage of a local football match rather report the killings. Later, when the channels do cover the deaths, they start by showing the picture of the gunman with the caption "God bless his soul" -- in the same manner as they would normally relate to the victim of a terror attack.

Despite the Prime Minister denouncing the gunman as a terrorist to the world, domestically the media and police concentrate instead on the "lynch mob" who killed the gunman. The police launch a secretive investigation which after 10 months leads to the arrests of seven men on charges of murdering him, and the promise of more arrests to come. A police spokesman describes the men's act against the gunman as one of "cold-blooded murder".

Fanciful? Ridiculous? Well, exactly these events have unfolded in Israel over the past year -- except that the location was not the Jewish city of Nentanya but the Arab town of Shafa'amr in the Galilee; the gunman was not a Palestinian but an Israeli soldier using his army-issue M-16; and the victims were not Israeli Jews but Israeli Arabs.

See how it now starts to make sense.

The killing of four Palestinian citizens of Israel by the 19-year-old soldier Eden Natan Zada on 4 August last year, shortly before the disengagement from Gaza, has been quietly forgotten by the world. After the Arab victims were buried, the only question that concerned Israelis was who killed Zada. Yesterday they appeared to get their answer: seven men from Shafa'amr were rounded up by Israeli police to stand trial for his "cold-blooded" murder.

No one was interested in the official neglect of the families of Shafa'amr's dead, all of whom were denied the large compensation payments given to Israeli victims of Palestinian terror. A ministerial committee ruled that, because Zada was a serving soldier, his attack could not be considered a terrorist incident. Apparently only Arabs can be terrorists. To this day the state has not given the families a penny of the compensation automatically awarded to Jewish families.

There was no investigation of why Zada, well-known for his extremist views, had been allowed to go AWOL for weeks from his unit without attempts to trace him. Or how his family's repeated warnings that he had threatened to do something "terrible" to stop the disengagement had been ignored by the authorities. No one questioned why, a few days before his attack, the police had sent Zada away after he tried to hand in his gun.

Even more disturbingly, no one discussed why Zada, who openly belonged to a racist and outlawed movement, Kach, which demands the expulsion, if not eradication, of Arabs from the Holy Land, had been allowed to serve in the army. How had he and thousands of other Kach supporters been left in peace to promote their obscene ideas? Why were these Kach activists, mostly young Israelis, demonstrating openly against the Gaza disengagement, assaulting policemen and soldiers, when the group was supposedly underground?

And why did the authorities not round up and question Zada's Kach friends in his West Bank settlement of Tapuah after the attack? Why was their possible involvement in its planning never considered, nor their role in inciting him to his deed?

The point was that the Israeli authorities wanted Zada to be dismissed as a lone, crazy gunman -- like Baruch Goldstein before him, the army doctor who in 1994 opened fire in the Palestinian city of Hebron, killing 29 Muslim worshippers at the Tomb of the Patriarchs and wounding 125 others.

Although Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister then, denounced Goldstein as an "errant weed", a shrine and park was built for him nearby, in the settlement of Kiryat Arba, venerating him as a "saint" and "a righteous and holy man". Far from being isolated, his shrine regularly attracts thousands of Israeli Jews who congregate deep in Palestinian territory to honor him.

Instead of seeking out and eradicating this growing strain of Jewish fundamentalism in the wake of the Shafa'amr terror attack, Israel claimed that finding and punishing the men who killed Zada was the priority. It was a matter of law and order, said Dan Ronen, the police force's northern commander. He told the Hebrew media: "In a country with law and order, despite the sensitivity, people can't do whatever they see fit. I hope the Arab sector will display maturity and responsibility."

This sounds like an outrageous double standard to the citizens of Shafa'amr, and to the country's more than one million Palestinian citizens. Enforcing the law has never been a major consideration when the offenders are Jewish and the victims are Arabs, even when the killings occur inside Israel.

Arab citizens have not forgotten the massacre of 49 men, women and children by a unit of soldiers who enforced a last-minute curfew on the Israeli village of Kfar Qassem in 1956, executing the villagers -- Arabs, of course -- at the checkpoint one by one as they innocently returned home from a day's work in the fields.

During their trial, the Haaretz newspaper reported that the soldiers received a 50 per cent pay increase and that it was obvious the men were "not treated as criminals but as heroes". Found guilty of an "administrative error", the commander was given a one penny fine.

Nor was anyone held to account when six unarmed Arab citizens were shot dead by the security services in the Galilean town of Sakhnin in 1976 as they protested against another wave of land confiscations that deprived rural Arab communities of their farm land. The prime minister of the day, Rabin again, refused even to launch an investigation.

Some 25 years later, an inquiry was held into the killing by the police of 13 unarmed Arabs in the Galilee in October 2000 as they protested the deaths of Palestinians at the Noble Sanctuary in Jerusalem -- the trigger for the Intifada. Six years on, however, not a single policeman has been charged over the deaths inside Israel. Even the commanders who illegally authorized the use of an anti-terror sniper unit against demonstrators armed only with stones have not been punished.

Israel's Arab citizens are also more than familiar with the story of the "Bus 300 affair" of 1984, when two Palestinian gunmen from the occupied territories were captured after hijacking a bus inside Israel. Led away in handcuffs by the Shin Bet security service, the two men were later reported dead.

No one was ever charged over the killings, even though it was widely known at the time who had killed the men and later one senior Shin Bet operative, Ehud Yatom, admitted breaking the men's skulls with a rock. In 1986, to forestall the threat of any indictments, the president of the day, Chaim Herzog, gave all the Shin Bet agents involved an amnesty from prosecution.

If it is shown in court that Zada was in fact beaten to death after the crowd knew he had been restrained, then this history -- of the state's repeated denial of justice to the Arab victims of its violence -- must be taken into account. No one can reasonably have expected the onlookers to stay calm knowing that Zada, like other Jewish emissaries of the state before him, would receive either no punishment or a few years of jail and a pardon because he killed Arabs rather than Jews.

Israel has shown time and again that it selectively enforces law and order, depending on the ethnicity of killer and victim.

Commander Ronen observed at a press conference after the Shafa'amr arrests: "Since October 2000 we have come a long way in our relations with the Arab sector." If that is true, which is doubtful, the authorities have again made every effort to tear apart what little is left of that trust.

"The network was tasked by this agency with carrying out these operations and was given secret communication and monitoring devices for this purpose along with detailed maps of the target... forged documents and bags with secret pockets."

Israel has dismissed accusations it was behind the car bombing last month that killed Mahmoud Majzoub, known as Abu Hamze, and his brother Nidal, both members of the Palestinian group Islamic Jihad, in the southern Lebanese city of Sidon.

Several Palestinian militants and Hezbollah officials have been killed in Lebanon in recent years in attacks their organizations have blamed on Israel.

Two days after the last assassination, rockets fired from southern Lebanon into northern Israel wounded an Israel Defense Forces soldier, prompting the Israel to launch its heaviest air raid against Syrian-backed Palestinian militants and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon since it withdraw from the area in 2000.

Rafeh admitted to the murder of Hezbollah official Ali Hasan Deeb in 1999 in the southern town of Arba, the killing of another Hezbollah official in Beirut in 2003 and the killing of Palestinian militant Jihad Jibreel in 2002, the army said.

Jibreel, killed in a bombing aimed at his car in Beirut, was the son of Ahmed Jibril, head of the Damascus-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command.

The army said Rafeh had also confessed to planting other bombs that were either found and defused before they were detonated or missed their targets.

Syrian and Iranian-backed Hezbollah as well as Jibril welcomed the arrests in interviews with Hezbollah's al-Manar TV.

Pro-Syrian President Emile Lahoud said they proved that "Israel had not ceased its attempts to sabotage Lebanon."

Television footage released by the Lebanese Army showed equipment it said was used in the latest attack and discovered either at Rafeh's house in the Lebanese town of Hasbaya, on the border with Israel, or in a chalet that he used.

The find included what the army said was an Israeli camera that can be used to take detailed photographs of streets while concealed within a bag, forged driving licences and identity documents it said Rafeh had received from Israel.

The footage also showed an air conditioning unit and a large speaker converted into secret cabinets that the army said were used to transport explosives used in the Sidon bombing.

Other finds included a television cabinet and a table fitted with secret drawers to conceal coded messaging devices.

The army said the attackers had used a car door, packed with explosives before being smuggled from Israel, in the bombing that killed the two Islamic Jihad officials in Sidon.

The army is hunting a Palestinian man also believed to be part of the network, and those arrested will be taken to court, security sources said.

"I spoke today with the prime minister and he said we definitely want quiet everywhere. We are interested in a ceasefire everywhere," Hamas' spokesman Ghazi Hamad said in an interview on Israel Radio.

However, Hamad said the offer was conditional on Israel stopping its "aggression" against the Palestinians.

"We are ready to launch discussions with factions over stopping rocket firing but only if there is an Israeli commitment to cease all military attacks against all Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank."

Israel continued its bombardments of Gaza even after Friday's tragedy. The deadliest attack was on Tuesday when an Israeli missile killed 11 people, including two schoolchildren.

On the other hand, Hamas fired several rockets towards southern Israel after the beach attack, but there has been a sharp drop in anti-Israeli attacks in recent days.

Israeli officials said today that the cessation is due to threats made by top members of Israeli premier Ehud Olmert's party to assassinate senior Hamas leaders, including Prime Minister Ismael Haneya, if the rocket fire continued.

However, Israeli media reported that four rockets struck the southern Israeli town of Sderot on Thursday, lightly wounding two people.

The Islamic Jihad resistance group, which has never accepted the ceasefire, claimed responsibility for the rocket attacks.

Israel, along with the U.S. and Europe, classify Hamas as a terror group and imposed a trade embargo on the Palestinian government following Hamas' election victory in the January legislative polls.

Tensions between Fatah and Hamas escalated since the resistance group formed the government in March. More than 22 people have been killed in clashes between the two parties in the past two months.

One of the major problems between Hamas and Fatah is the control of the security services.

Israel and the West want President Mahmoud Abbas to win the power struggle and have tried to bolster his security forces. Hamas has warned that such attempts would worsen tensions.

According to Israel's daily Yedioth Ahronoth, Olmert approved a shipment of weapons to Abbas, saying that he wanted to help the Palestinian president against Hamas.

The newspaper said that the Israeli government transferred 950 M-16 assault rifles from Jordan to Abbas' security forces.

"Any Israeli intervention in our internal affairs is rejected because the Israelis aim to sow divisions among the Palestinian people," said top Hamas MP Mushir al-Masri.

On the other hand, an Abbas' aide denied the report.

Israel's arms shipment to Abbas' security forces could embarrass the president, especially after he intensified pressure on Hamas by calling for a referendum on a statehood plan that implicitly recognizes Israel.

Hamas argues that the July 26 referendum is unconstitutional, accusing Abbas of engineering a coup against its democratically elected government.

Hariri was killed in a massive bomb blast that also killed 22 others on the Beirut seafront in February 2005.

The council resolution also backed the UN enquiry commission's "intention, as it deems appropriate and consistent with its mandate, to extend further its technical assistance to the Lebanese authorities" with regard to 14 other attacks in Lebanon since October 1, 2004, including against anti-Syrian figures.

Wednesday, Brammertz cited "potential linkages" between the Hariri murder probe and the 14 other attacks.

"In light of the potential linkages between the Hariri investigation and the 14 other cases, the (Brammertz) commission believes that a much more concerted and robust effort is needed to move these cases forward," Brammertz then told the 15-member body.

The 14 cases include assassinations and assassination attempts targeting anti-Syrian Lebanese figures, as well as attacks on commercial interests.

The Belgian prosecutor said Lebanese authorities probing the 14 other bombings since October 1, 2004 lacked "significant forward investigative momentum" because they lacked "forensic capacity to collect and analyze evidence effectively."

He said his panel had reached the preliminary conclusion that from an analytical standpoint the 14 cases could be linked, notably in the similarities "in the modus operandi and their possible intent."

But he also cautioned that no evidence had been developed "that would allow identification and linking of the perpetrators."

Noting that "no clear linkages" had been found between the 14 cases and the Hariri probe, he added: "Further coordinated investigative work and additional capacities are required to elicit such evidentiary links."

Among the 14 cases are several assassinations, including the murder of anti-Syrian newspaper boss and MP Gibran Tueni last December, which some Lebanese lawmakers have blamed on Damascus.

Syria, however, denied any involvement.

Tueni, 48, and three other people were killed when a car bomb exploded in a Beirut suburb, just hours after the Christian MP returned from France, where he had taken refuge, fearing his life was in danger.

Syria, which has strenuously denied any role in the Hariri killing, has come under intense international pressure to cooperate with the UN probe.

Brammertz noted Wednesday that cooperation from the Syrians has been "generally satisfactory," with more than 10 requests sent to them answered in a timely manner and currently being evaluated.

His report handed to UN chief
Kofi Annan Saturday, however, said: "Full and unconditional cooperation from Syria to the commission remains crucial."

The UN probe could lead to the establishment of an international tribunal to try those found responsible for the murder.

Brammertz took over as head of the UN probe last January from his German predecessor, Detlev Mehlis.

Two previous reports under Mehlis had suggested top-level Syrian involvement in the assassination plot, and blasted Damascus for failing to cooperate and actively seeking to mislead the investigation.

The other two parts were an emergency contribution for essential utilities, including fuel, and a "social safety net" to come into effect later which would involve paying money directly into accounts of individuals based on their needs.

Spokeswoman Emma Udwin reiterated that the EU is very close to reaching agreement with its Mideast quartet partners on the temporary funding mechanism for the Palestinians bypassing their Hamas-led government.

"We hope we can see that final endorsement in the coming days," said Udwin, a spokeswoman for EU External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner.