Still shooting, the gunman chased the screaming students down a grassy river embankment while his fellow soldiers yelled "Madman, madman" before overpowering him. He was in the custody of Jordanian security officials.
It was unclear whether the gunman, army driver Lance Cpl. Ahmed Mustafa, had political motives or was mentally unstable. But the shooting on the island of Naharayim - known as the "Island of Peace" - came at a time of deep crisis between Israel and Jordan over the impasse in Mideast peacemaking.
Israeli leaders indirectly blamed Jordan's King Hussein for creating the climate that made such violence possible. "Words and a difficult atmosphere can also lead to violence," Defense Minister Yitzhak Mordechai said.
Earlier this week, Hussein sent a harsh letter to Benjamin Netanyahu, accusing the prime minister of endangering Mideast peace with his tough policies toward the Palestinians.
"When I warned a few days ago of the danger of the possibility of violence, I never thought it would lead to this," the king said in Spain, where he cut short a trip to return home. He bristled, however, at suggestions he was somehow responsible, saying he has the right to warn of the dangers to peacemaking.
The shooting also was "aimed at me, my children, the people of Jordan," Hussein said.
President Clinton called the shootings a "senseless denial of a future for these children" and said, "I condemn this act in the strongest possible terms."
Clinton advised against directly linking the shooting to new tension in the region. The president called Netanyahu from Air Force One en route to North Carolina to express condolences.
The shooting happened sometime after 11 a.m., when the students from the Feirst School, a modern Orthodox school in central Israel, arrived at the border post.
They were visiting Naharayim, an island that Israel returned to Jordan under the two countries' 1994 peace treaty. It is a popular tourist spot for Israelis, and a sign at the entrance reads "Island of Peace." The gunman lived close by in the Jordanian town of South Shuna.
He had been sitting in his jeep when the school bus pulled up on a grassy hill and about 40 eighth graders filed out see the sweeping river valley view. Without warning, he grabbed an assault rifle from another soldier in the jeep and started shooting.
"He came very close to us, face to face," said teacher Rosa Chemy. "He continued to fire, except at the moment when his ammunition clip finished."
"We all panicked," said Oranit Burgauker who was shot in the shoulder. "We were on the hill, and everyone started running down. Everyone lay down so they wouldn't be hit."
On the verge of tears, speaking from her hospital bed in Israel, Oranit said a Jordanian soldier lifted her up and put her on the back of a red truck. She said she jumped off the truck, ran to an Israeli bus, and fled from the scene with some of the others.
"We're only children. We're only children," one survivor sobbed after being rescued.
The girls were taken to hospitals in Jordan and Israel; two died in Israel, and five died on the bumpy 15-minute ride to Jordan's Shuna Hospital. Dozens of Jordanian farmers in robes and red headdresses crammed into a hospital hallway to donate blood - some of which was used to save an Israel girl who had a bullet removed from her chest.
"It is sad because these are innocent children of the age of my daughters," said farmer Mohammad Khalayeh.
In the central Israeli town of Beit Shemesh, dozens of anguished mothers and fathers waited yesterday night for the return of their children, weeping when buses arrived with the uninjured girls.
Memorial candles arranged in the shape of the number seven flickered outside the Feirst School. Students prayed together quietly. A sign said: "May their memories be blessed."
The shootings come as Israeli-Jordanian relations are at their worst in years. Hussein's sharp letter to Netanyahu was followed yesterday by Israeli media reports that officials close to the prime minister had suggested the king was emotionally unstable.
Netanyahu's office denied the reports yesterday, but personal relations between the king and Netanyahu reached a new low. Netanyahu's office said that after the shooting, the king tried to call the prime minister, but couldn't get through. Crown Prince Hassan relayed Jordanian condolences.
Netanyahu asked Jordan to act swiftly to punish the assailant. "This was a violent, criminal attack on a bus full of children. Young girls were murdered," he said.
Netanyahu also received a condolence call from Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, whom the Israeli leader had tried to contact in vain for several days to discuss the growing crisis in Israeli-Palestinian relations.
The Palestinians are angry over recent Israeli decisions to build a Jewish homes in Arab east Jerusalem and to offer a West Bank troop pullback on far less land than the Palestinians had expected.
AP PHOTO
An Israeli girl is being conforted by her friends at the Feirst school in the central Israeli town of Beit Shemesh after hearing about the shooting incidents that her schoolmates were involved in yesterday.