JERUSALEM -- Every morning, bus driver Eli Bromli has the same arguments with soldiers: Board through the front bus door, not the back, he tells them. Get on. Take a seat. Don't dawdle.
Yesterday, his insistence may have saved their lives. A Palestinian suicide bomber was killed when his explosive went off at a bus stop Christmas morning. Twelve people were wounded, one seriously.
The bomber apparently intended to board Mr. Bromli's bus, full of Israeli soldiers going to a base. But he was blocked when the driver closed the rear door and moved the bus forward.
"I didn't see the man," Mr. Bromli, 39, said. "But the soldiers are always trying to get in the back door. They want to avoid seeing their officers, because they are late or unshaven or something. But I closed the back door and moved the bus up a little."
Moments later, the blast demolished a kiosk behind Mr. Bromli's bus.
A militant wing of the Muslim fundamentalist group Hamas claimed that a member from the Gaza Strip, whom they identified as Ayman Kamal Radi, carried out the attack. Israel Radio said Mr. Radi, 22, once had been a traffic policeman in the Palestinian police force.
The Hamas wing, Izzadim al-Qassam, has shaken Israel and threatened the peace process with a series of suicide bomb attacks in the past year, many of them centered on Israeli buses.
The blast came just past 6 a.m. yesterday, a routine workday in Israel. It occurred at a bus stop near the Jerusalem Central Bus Station.
Israeli officials speculated that the bomb went off accidentally after the bomber failed to board the bus.
"I heard a strong explosion. I saw a big bomb of fire," said Chaim Mizrah, 30, who was selling candy and kosher hot dogs at a kiosk across the street.
"I went over there. There wasn't really a lot of panic. There were wounded. The guy who did it was laying there. . . . You couldn't really tell how old he was," he said.
The blast shattered the back windows of Mr. Bromli's bus, but no one inside was injured, the driver said.
The corpse of the bomber, a man with a full beard in Islamic fashion, lay at the scene for several hours while police investigated the incident. Police said the man had about 12 pounds of TNT strapped to his waist.
"We were very lucky," Jerusalem Police Chief Assaf Hefetz said on Israel Radio. "Apparently, the explosive device malfunctioned, but very fortunately for us, he blew himself up without anyone in his immediate vicinity."
Hours after the attack, Mr. Bromli sat in the seat of his bus, and the possibilities of the day's event caught up with him. He fought back tears.
"In this job you have to do everything right. It's like the pilot of an airplane. If you do something wrong there can be big trouble," he lamented. His charter bus was filled with about 40 soldiers who report to an air force base near Tel Aviv every day.
"If I had stayed at the bus stop, for sure some of the soldiers would have been killed. Every day they argue with me, the same arguments about the back door. But if I didn't close it and move the bus. . . With my stubbornness, I saved them."
Chief Hefetz said it is nearly impossible to stop this kind of attack.
"Our system of roadblocks and checks is not absolute," he said. "There is no doubt it can allow for the penetration of a man like this with an explosive device."
A similar attack Oct. 19 blew up a bus in the heart of Tel Aviv, killing 23, the highest death toll in such an incident in 16 years. Two other attacks at bus stops in northern Israel in April claimed 14 lives.
The government of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin often has vowed to continue negotiations with the Palestinians despite the attacks. But recently Mr. Rabin has hinted that he might renege on the peace agreement Israel signed with the Palestinians unless the security of Israelis is assured.
Hamas opposes the peace process and has clashed in the Gaza Strip with the Palestinian authorities under Chairman Yasser Arafat, who negotiated the agreement with Israel. The worst such clash occurred Nov. 18, when Palestinian policemen opened fire on Hamas supporters, killing 13.
Israel Radio, quoting Palestinian sources, said yesterday's bomber, Mr. Radi, was a policeman in the Nov. 18 clash. His act yesterday may have been intended as a form of atonement for shooting at other Palestinians, Israel Radio said.
A spokesman for Mr. Arafat said the Palestinian leader offered a "clear condemnation of this criminal act that happened on the holiest day of the birth of Jesus Christ."
Nabil Shaath, a top aide to Mr. Arafat, said, "I am full of sadness, grief, and condemnation for an attack on civilians that takes place in Jerusalem during Christmas."
Israeli Police Minister Moshe Shahal said: "This is the kind of terror against innocent civilians that is an attempt to sabotage any peace talks or peace conditions. It may be that they wanted to do something because of Christmas."
Israeli opponents of the peace plan immediately seized on the bombing to call again for a halt in the agreement to withdraw Israeli troops from populated Palestinian areas in the West Bank.
"This attack is a manifestation of the government policy," said opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu. "It will become a lot more frequent and a lot more deadly if we follow through on the government's plan."