Mohamed Shakar Habishi was a ticking bomb. Yesterday, he blew himself up - killing three Israelis and injuring more than 90.
For 10 days, the Israeli security forces had tried frantically to find him - knowing that Islamic militants in the West Bank city of Jenin had given him an explosive device.
Late last week, the Israeli army burst into his home; he was elsewhere.
The blast yesterday at Nahariya railway station was the bloodiest evidence of the failure to track him down.
It may sound ridiculous to think in such terms, but Mr Habishi was anything but "your average suicide bomber".
There have been about 30 suicide bombings, or attempted bombings, in the past year of intifada violence - most carried out by young Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza.
Mr Habishi was middle-aged, had two wives and three children.
But most strikingly different of all, he was an Israeli - a resident of the Galilee village of Abu Snan, a shopkeeper and a one-time failed candidate to head the local council.
He was also an activist from the sometimes radical Islamic Movement, and he had strong ties to Hamas militants.
Yesterday morning, Mr Habishi waited for 20 minutes by a kiosk outside the railway station at Nahariya, near Israel's northern border. And when the train came in from Tel Aviv, eyewitnesses say, he detonated the bomb he was carrying on his back.
"I walked past him," said Mr Nir Harel, a soldier who was injured in the attack. "Actually, I bumped into him. I even said sorry. Then came the blast."
Abu Snan is a village with a substantial Druze population - many of whom serve in the Israeli army - and a Muslim minority. The entire local council met last night to draft a unanimous statement condemning the bombing; locals castigated Habishi for "staining" the village.
Hamas activists in the West Bank and Gaza Strip were last night said to be celebrating the fact that the "cycle of violence" against Israel had now been widened to include a first Israeli-Arab suicide bomber. Leaders of the community in Israel, by contrast, were at pains to assert that Habishi was a one-off.
"He represented no one but himself," said Mr Fawzi Mishlab, the head of the local council in Abu Snan who had defeated him in the leadership race.
On a day that also saw a second suicide bombing in central Israel, a fatal drive-by shooting in the Jordan Valley and retaliatory Israeli missile strikes on five West Bank cities, the surge in violence fuelled pressure in the Israeli government for the cancellation of talks - only tentatively scheduled in any case - between the Israeli Foreign Minister, Mr Shimon Peres, and the President of the Palestinian Authority, Mr Yasser Arafat.
Several cabinet ministers argued at a meeting yesterday that, by showing a readiness to hold such talks, Mr Peres was preserving an international perception of Mr Arafat as a potential peacemaker when, they argued, he was actively inciting violence.
"The man doesn't want to talk, he wants to shoot," said Mr Raanan Gissin, an aide to the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon.
Mr Peres has consistently countered that Mr Arafat represents Israel's only hope, however faint, of a partner with whom to negotiate a ceasefire.
Until that ceasefire is achieved, as yesterday's Nahariya bombing illustrated, the confrontation continues to draw in an ever-wider circle of participants.
Meanwhile, Mr Ziad Abu Ziad, Mr Arafat's minister for Jerusalem, was yesterday barred from the city by the Israeli authorities - who said he lacked the necessary permits.
Mr Ziad noted "I was born in Jerusalem" and he vowed that the Israelis would not prevent him in future from entering the city.