The bomber put down his bag in the heart of the crowded cafeteria and made his escape. When the device went off, it brought down most of the ceiling, cut two gashes in the white plaster on one wall, shattered every window across the room, left a steel air-conditioning vent hanging limply down almost to floor level, writes David Horowitz in Jerusalem.
And it killed or injured everyone in the immediate vicinity - dozens of Jews and Arabs, overseas students, university staff and workers, who had been eating lunch at the self-service restaurant in the heart of the Mount Scopus campus of Jerusalem's Hebrew University.
"I'd been right there, talking to some of the university staff," said Sharon Amital, a student, struggling to speak. "I don't know what happened to them. But I'd walked away, to sit on the other side. That's what saved me. I hadn't even sat down when it went off. There was a huge noise, smoke, blood everywhere, bodies on the floor. I climbed out through the windows."
The latest in an appalling routine of murderous attacks, yesterday's blast was nevertheless unusual. It was not a suicide attack. The device was smuggled deep into what should have been a highly secured area - to a cafeteria so distant from the nearest roads as to have immensely complicated the rescue operation, with emergency staff forced to run with the injured on their stretchers along lengthy alleys and down winding ramps to the nearest ambulance access area.
And it was aimed at a university campus, hitherto spared the ravages of this conflict - and a campus, moreover, with a substantial Arab student body: among the dozens of panic-stricken relatives and friends trying to track down their loved ones for hours after the blast were Arab students like Bassam Hijaz, still searching for people he knew had been eating there.
School was formally out, but the campus was crowded. There were exams, summer courses, programmes for foreign students, staff gearing up for the coming semester.
The black body-bags were laid in a line around the corner from the bomb site. Rescue workers and took the broken sections of the ceiling out through the holes where the windows used to be.
Arab cleaners from the Jerusalem city council swept up glass, pausing periodically to light cigarettes and shake their heads at the horror of it all. On a lawn just below, near a corridor where students have posted flat-share advertisements in Hebrew, English and Arabic, a girl cried softly into her mobile phone.
Three months ago, the university's student newspaper carried an article headlined "Chronicle of an Inevitable Attack", which detailed flaws in campus security and posited a nightmare scenario in which a Palestinian gunman opened fire on diners at this very cafeteria, killing seven of them. "I chose the number at random," said Ben Vered, who wrote the piece, taken aback at the eerie accuracy of his prediction. The bomber killed them at random, too.