For a Shaken Israeli, Terrorism Now Has a Face : Mideast: He stared down a gun barrel and lived. Now his relief is tempered by guilt about what he could have done to prevent bloodshed.

For Shlomo Eitan, terrorism was something that happened to other people, but this week he came face to face with it on the way to work. He escaped with his life but was left pondering why he survived and two other Israelis, one the mother of four and the other a new immigrant, were killed.

“This wasn’t television, this wasn’t the movies--this was real,” Eitan said after the carnage wrought by Palestinian terrorists Thursday. “There was a real man with a real gun, and he was pointing it right at me. He was ready to kill me, but he didn’t. All I could think was, ‘I don’t want to die.’ ”

But even as he savored his relief, Eitan also grappled with his guilt. Could his own split-second choices have changed the outcome?

Gun in hand, Eitan had given chase. For an instant--”the longest 20 seconds of my life”--he thought he could have fired at one of the terrorists.

“But then I saw elderly people, Arab men and women, and children coming out of their houses to see what was happening. I was afraid I would kill someone else by mistake. I didn’t shoot. I just couldn’t take the risk.

“If I had, I ask myself now, would the whole thing have ended there?”

An apparent attempt by two or three Palestinian gunmen to hijack and blow up a bus with 80 men and women on their way to work, the attack during the Thursday morning rush hour left four people dead--two gunmen in addition to the two Israeli women--and two more wounded.

And it reminded Israelis how vulnerable they remain to terrorism even as they go about their daily routines.

“This is war,” Eitan said, still shaken by his experience. “This was happening to me, not to a soldier or a policeman; it was happening in Jerusalem, and it was happening as we are trying to talk peace with the Arabs.”

Questions arose immediately about the effectiveness of the three-month closure of the West Bank and Gaza Strip as a measure to protect Israelis from terrorist attacks within their own borders, because the attack occurred not only within Jerusalem but almost opposite the national police headquarters.

“Every day I drive that road, thinking not about being attacked but avoiding traffic jams,” said Eitan, a native of Boston who immigrated to Israel more than 15 years ago and now teaches Hebrew. “That’s life in Israel--one thinks not about terrorism until it occurs.”

Running five minutes late for a 7:30 a.m. lesson with his first student of the day, Eitan was concentrating on making up lost time in the thick flow of traffic on Nablus Road from Jerusalem’s northern suburbs into the city when he heard shots.

“It was ‘pop, pop, pop,’ and I started looking to see who had had a blowout and what lane he was in,” Eitan said. “Terrorism was the furthest thing from my mind.”

But the bus ahead--a red-and-white commuter bus on Route No. 25 from Neve Ya’akov, where Eitan lives--swerved wildly and then jerked to a stop.

The driver and two passengers had been wounded as two gunmen, reportedly members of the military wing of Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, opened fire inside the bus as it approached police headquarters.

“As he pointed the M-16 (automatic rifle), I already understood what was happening,” said 32-year-old bus driver David Yom-Tov. “I left (the wheel), I jumped on him and caught his weapon, and then he shot me in the leg . . . .

“Now that I am thinking about it, I am beginning to realize what I prevented. He would have killed us all.”

A wounded passenger, Olga Chaikova, 42, a new immigrant from Russia and the mother of a 13-year-old daughter, was shot in the head and died Thursday evening. She was buried Friday.

Mustafa Salah Osman, 22, who was also wounded, reportedly belongs to Hamas in the Gaza Strip and is wanted by Israeli military authorities there; police believe he may have been one of the gunmen and was shot during the scuffling, but they have not been able to question him because of his injury.

After the bus came to a halt, a Palestinian armed with a shortened version of the M-16 assault rifle jumped off and began to run. Eitan--who, like many Israelis, carries a gun for self-protection--got out of his car and ran after him, pistol in hand.

“He was maybe 20 or 30 meters away, and maybe I could have shot him,” Eitan recalled.

But on an instant’s calculation of the risk to bystanders, he held his fire.

“I wanted to shoot him, but there were so many people around I couldn’t. Our people (Israelis) were calling out to me, ‘Shoot, shoot!’ but I could not take the risk that I would hit someone else.”

Suddenly, the first gunman was joined by another, who confronted Eitan.

“It was me and him, and he had a gun pointed at my head,” Eitan said. “All around people were screaming in Hebrew, in Russian, in Yiddish, in Arabic. I didn’t fire; he didn’t fire. And then he was gone.”

That moment, face to face with a man who had just mortally wounded Chaikova, was “the most frightening experience I ever had--times a hundred,” Eitan said.

“I didn’t want to die, and I guess he didn’t want to die because we could have killed one another right there. If one had fired, the other would have too. We would both have died.”

As they fled, the two gunmen took hostage a woman motorist, Jeanette Kadosh-Dayan, 39, a mother of four arriving for work at an architect’s office. They tossed hand grenades out of her car to halt pursuers and drove wildly around Jerusalem’s walled Old City and then south toward Bethlehem before being stopped at a military roadblock. There, soldiers and border police opened fire and killed the terrorists.

The two dead Palestinians, who still have not been identified, reportedly were members of a Hamas military cell based in Hebron, south of Jerusalem.

From the number of bombs, at least eight, and grenades that the gunmen had, police theorize that the plan was to take the passengers hostage and perhaps blow the vehicle up in the center of Jerusalem.

Thrown from the vehicle before the police and soldiers opened fire, Kadosh-Dayan was apparently killed by shrapnel generated when the car virtually exploded; the bombs that the gunmen were carrying had been set off.

Eitan, the father of six, was happy to return home safely, but the unanswerable questions lingered with him.

“It was one of those absolute moral dilemmas,” Eitan said. “Had I shot, I might have hit him and then that poor woman (Kadosh-Dayan) might be alive.

“But I might have hit an innocent bystander just as easily, and I might have been killed myself. Part of me feels guilty--I ache with it--but the rest of me feels very fortunate to be alive.”