By PHIL REEVES
JERUSALEM - In a heavily guarded room at a hospital near Tel Aviv, Israeli interrogators have been trying to solve a question that has baffled the entire world.
What - or who - turned Khalil Abu Olbeh, a mild-mannered Palestinian bus driver with no record of violence or political militancy, into a ruthless killer?
Sickened and angry, Israel buried most of the eight young victims yesterday - seven of them soldiers, seven of them aged 21 or younger, five of them women - whom he mowed down with his bus as they stood at a hitch-hiking post at Azur, a few miles south of Tel Aviv, at rush hour on Wednesday.
But the country's grief was coupled with bewilderment. Suddenly, Israel finds itself gazing at a new face of an old enemy - an attacker who worked compliantly in its midst for years, who repeatedly passed security checks, yet who, suddenly, set out to kill as many Israelis as he could.
Only a week earlier, Ariel Sharon was elected Prime Minister by a vast margin because Israel believed his promise that he could keep them secure. But the carnage reaped by Abu Olbeh - and the fact that he could do so without bombs or bullets - has already proved the emptiness of that pledge, shaking Israel to its core.
The respected Ha'aretz newspaper says the interrogators quizzing Abu Olbeh as he lay in Kaplan hospital at Rehovot, with his bullet wounds swathed in bandages, have been told by him that the attack was pre-planned. But this does not explain why he did it.
Plenty of men like Abu Olbeh live in the Gaza Strip. They are quiet men, who do not belong to the militant political organisations and guerrilla groups leading the Palestinian intifada.
They are working men, who devote their energies to feeding their families, a far from easy task in a society in which nearly a third of the population has only the equivalent of $5.60 a day to spend.
They are men, past their youthful years, who sit all day behind the wheels of cabs or on market stalls, before gathering in groups in the rubbish-strewn streets as the sun sets over the sand-dune-covered prison in which they live, encircled by the Israeli military.
You meet his type often. Only when the subject of Israel comes up do you glimpse the anger that boils inside them.
And when you do, it becomes clear that it is a deeply ingrained emotion, a rage steadily grafted on their being by a lifetime under Israeli military occupation - for that is what it still must be called, even though two-thirds of the strip is now under Yasser Arafat's rule - for year after year.
At 35, Abu Olbeh knew nothing else. He was a babe in arms when the Israeli occupation began in 1967.
But he was better than most at concealing his fury. So good was he that he joined the list of only 16,000 Gazans to whom Israel's Shin Bet security services was willing to grant permission to leave the strip during the emergency caused by the intifada.
On January 25, after the last of many security checks, he reportedly received a fresh permit to work inside Israel.
And why not? To the Israeli security officials scrutinising his records, he set off no alarm bells. He had never been arrested, either by them or the Palestinian security forces.
His details breathed compliance ... married, with five children, three boys and two girls aged between 3 and 11; living modestly with his wife, Menal, 32, who is four months pregnant; his mother and his brother's family in a cinderblock house.
The hatred felt towards Israel is everywhere in Gaza.
It blazes from the walls - with their posters of the latest "martyrs" shot by the Israeli military, and paintings of the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, the holy place for which the Palestinians have convinced themselves that they are fighting. It blares from the Palestinian-run radio and television stations.
Yet it seems no one suspected how deeply it was gnawing into Abu Olbeh. When Western reporters reached his relatives - just as Israel was slamming the door even more tightly shut, by imposing a total closure on the occupied territories in response to the attack - the family seemed truly bewildered.
Several thought it was a road accident - a theory later floated, to the disgust of Israelis, by Yasser Arafat. His wife, Menal, still believes this.
There will have been amazement, and also horror, among the agents of Shin Bet. Abu Olbeh bore no similarity to Israel's photo fit of the archetypal Palestinian militant - who is young, male, single, and has links to radical Islamic groups.
In fact, in Israeli terms, he was so spotless that his own neighbours in Sheikh Radwan, a refugee housing project in Gaza City, began to suspect that he was a collaborator.
His credentials also fitted the requirements of the Israeli bus company, Egged, for whom he has worked since 1996.
Yet there were hints that something was smouldering away within him. Like most of the other Palestinians in Gaza, he suffered from the collective punishment imposed by Israel to try to stifle the intifada.
The blockade of the Gaza Strip meant he had been unable to work in Israel for four months.
His is a story that typifies the plight of many Palestinians living under Israeli closure.
He had lost his monthly pay packet of 3000 shekels ($1713) for ferrying workers into Israel. Instead, he had been compelled to fall back on dismally paid occasional work as a taxi driver in the strip.
Even now, with his Israeli permit, he was getting only two days' work a week.
He took no active part in the intifada. But like everyone else, he has also witnessed the Israeli Army bulldoze more than 400ha of olive, citrus and palm groves.
He had seen Palestinian buildings rocketed and shelled by Israeli helicopters and gunboats, and Palestinian officials assassinated.
As Abu Olbeh went to bed on Tuesday, he turned to his neighbour and said: "Allah will save us."
A few hours later, at 2 am, he rose, calmly breakfasted, and set off on a horrifying mission to kill. Using his 11-tonne bus as his weapon he killed eight Israelis and wounded 17.
The grieving that has followed will pass, but the questions will not. How are Israelis to deal with enemies that live in their midst, and will resort to killing with their hands? Until an answer is found, there will be more Khalil Abu Olbehs.
- HERALD CORRESPONDENT
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