Orit, aged 12, had to have her right foot amputated; her brother, seven-year-old Yisrael, lost the bottom half of his right leg, and their sister, Tehila, aged eight, had both legs blown off.

The family's plight deepened the revulsion in Israel, and beyond, caused by the bomb. The evidence suggested the bus was a deliberate target. For weeks, Israel had been condemned for allowing its troops to shoot dead scores of teenage Arab rioters. Now the moral sands had shifted; the Palestinians were the child killers.

For Israeli government and military officials, this was proof of what they had been saying all along. From the start, they have accused the Palestinians of cynically abusing their children by allowing, and even encouraging, them to go into the riot zones where they become a human shield for gunmen.

When children were killed by Israeli troops, it was their parents' fault, and that of the cowardly paramilitaries, and perhaps that of the Palestinian propagandists who use the massacre of teenagers to generate sympathy. The snipers, with the children and not the gunmen in their cross-hairs, are never to blame. But reality is never that well-organised.

Hussein, aged 15, moved to Ramallah on the West Bank from Massachusetts about eight years ago, when hisPalestinian-American father, Joey, decided to return home to run a grocery store and sandwich shop in the hope that peace would soon be sealed, and prosperity would follow.

But Hussein, his eldest boy, has taken to going to the front-line to throw rocks at the Israelis. The boy says he is not sent there by anyone. He swears he is not a member of a political organisation.

He is certainly not encouraged to go there by his parents; his father has tried to lock him in his room, but he escapes. Nor is he part of a human shield of children. At his particular killing field in the el-Bireh suburb of Ramallah, the stone-throwers, sling-shooters and petrol bombers are generally well away from the line of fire of the gunmen, who conceal themselves hundreds of metres away. Hussein goes there because his mates are throwing rocks – several of them have been killed, and many wounded – but above all, he goes because he believes in the cause of Palestinian statehood, of ending Israeli occupation, with an adolescent's passion.

"We are proud I'm a Palestinian, and proud of the land I am fighting for," he told me. Then, he dropped the rhetoric. "Look, we know the stones don't hurt them, but it relieves our anger." Hussein, who has already been hit by a couple of rubber bullets, should not be out there, risking his life. But you can see how it happens.

In this, he has something in common with the Cohen children. Orit, Yisrael and Tehila should not have been there either. They belong to a community of Jewish settlers living on occupied Arab land because they believe it is theirs. Settler parents place their children in the frontline – in this case Gaza – in the name of their dogma.

The Israeli left, while condemning the bombing, has also begun asking whether it is worth losing Israeli lives over Jewish settlers occupying the West Bank and Gaza, who ought not to be there at all.

The argument was picked up yesterday by one of the country's best-known liberal commentators, A B Yehoshua, in the popular newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth. In an article headlined "For the sake of your children, evacuate", he told the settlers: "Come home from the Palestine exile. Only thus will we be able to set up a true border, a solid border that divides us from the State of Palestine. Only thus can we defend the State of Israel better and try to hope that one day we will live as peaceful neighbours."

© 2000 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd.

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