YOKNEAM, Israel — The would-be suicide bomber's plans were laid with painstaking precision, with chilling and methodical calm.
His target was carefully chosen -- an Israeli vocational school with hundreds of teenage students. His hand-sewn belt, primed with 22 pounds of explosives, was ready to be donned and detonated. His videotaped farewell, in which he expressed joy at the prospect of imminent "martyrdom," was already recorded and secreted away by Islamic Jihad, the Palestinian militant group to which the bomber belonged.
But as the attacker and a guide set out on that cold December morning from a village outside the West Bank town of Jenin, they were troubled by one detail.
To make their way to the school in this tidily nondescript Israeli industrial town, they would be forced to take a long and indirect route -- one that skirted the heavily fortified and tightly guarded Israeli barrier that runs along the northern edge of the West Bank.
That detour, Israeli investigators said later, proved the bomb plot's undoing. As the pair neared the end of a 30-mile journey to a lonely stretch of territory unprotected by the barrier, Israeli troops acting on intelligence reports -- and working against a relentlessly ticking clock -- swooped down and captured them.
To the great majority of Israelis, cases such as the foiled Yokneam suicide bombing are the most compelling argument for completing the barrier, which Israeli officials refer to as the "anti-terrorism fence." At the vocational school that was the intended target, students and their teachers unequivocally believe it was all that stood between them and the same bloodstained fate as hundreds of other Israeli victims of suicide bombings.
"We escaped by a miracle," said Rivka Zafir, the school's principal. "These children are our treasure, and they could have been taken from us, so many of them."
Despite a solid consensus among Israelis that they desperately need a bulwark against suicide attacks, however, debate over the route of the barrier has left the country deeply divided. Uneasy questions are raised daily as to whether what is intended as a measure to protect Israel's citizens will ultimately render the country an even more dangerous place because of the Palestinian fury over the barrier's appropriation of swaths of the West Bank.
