ON ONE side of the barrier stands the bombed wreckage of the No 14 bus, where, less than 24 hours earlier, eight Israelis were killed by a suicide bomber. Just feet away, separated by 24ft-high slabs of concrete, Ahmed Qureia, the Palestinian Prime Minister, railed against the iniquities of the “apartheid wall”.

Few scenes sum up so neatly the gulf between Israelis and Palestinians over the separation fence, or amplify the shrill war of words and images being waged in Israel and the West Bank.

Almost as soon as the dead had been cleared from the charred and windowless bus, the Israeli Defence Ministry decided that it illustrated the case for the separation barrier to keep out suicide bombers. The bomb had been deposited in the shadow of the towering wall in the Arab neighbourhood of Abu Dis on the fringes of Jerusalem.

Yesterday Jewish protesters summoned by the Foreign Ministry held placards bearing pictures and names of those who had died in other suicide bombings over the past three years.

Philip Hubert, 41, a British-Israeli businessman, was among those who clambered into the shattered remains of the bus to pose for the world’s media. “I feel the wall is just another mechanism to stop terrorism,” he said. “This bus here is just to show that had the wall been up eight people might not be dead.”

Fanny Haim, the wife of one of the victims, Yehuda Haim, 48, wrote an open letter to the 15 justices in The Hague pleading that a completed fence could have saved his life.

“Do not judge my country,” she wrote. “Do not restrain it from preventing additional people becoming victims. Today I’m burying my husband. Don’t you bury justice.”

Behind the bus on the far side of the barrier, hundreds of young Palestinians brandished flags and screamed their loyalty to al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, which carried out the attack on Sunday.

Mr Qureia, standing next to the wall, told the crowd that such barriers could not guarantee Israel’s security, but would breed discontent.

As the rally broke up, Palestinian youths hurled stones, injuring six police, who responded with tear gas and stun grenades. The violence was repeated in other towns and cities across the West Bank, where thousands of Palestinians held demonstrations in a “day of rage” against the separation fence. In some areas Israeli soldiers had to force demonstrators back from the fence using tear gas.

In a live television address from Ramallah, Yassir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, said that the barrier’s real purpose was to seize land to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with east Jerusalem as a capital.

“The whole world should pay attention to the unprecedented human tragedy being inflicted on our people because of the occupation,” he said. “This is another Berlin Wall. Peace will not be achieved between the two peoples or in the entire region in the presence of the wall of annexation, expansion and apartheid.”

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