Jerusalem — Three people were killed in a busy Jerusalem street yesterday after a Palestinian Arab used a bulldozer to toss cars like toys and turn over a bus before he was shot dead.

The attack started just after noon in the crowded Jaffa Street, not far from Jerusalem’s central bus station, when the man steered the 20-ton earth-moving machine off a building site and into traffic caught up by the construction work.

In a five-minute rampage, the bulldozer crushed a bus shelter, careered through several cars, sideswiped one bus, and then rammed another, flipping it on to its side.

Pedestrians scattered as a passing off-duty soldier and a security guard from a nearby bank began firing at the driver.

The bulldozer was finally slowed by a car under its tracks, allowing an Israeli special forces officer and a soldier to leap on to the vehicle and shoot the driver dead.

“I ran up the stairs [of the vehicle] and, when he was still driving like crazy and trying to harm civilians, I fired at him twice more and, that’s it, he was liquidated,” an anti-terrorism unit officer, Eli Mizrahi, said.

The attacker was named as Hussam Dwaith, a 31-year-old from Sur Baher in southern East Jerusalem, who was legally employed by an Israeli company working on the city’s new light rail line.

“He just went beserk. There was a car with a lady in it and he just cut it in two,” Gittl Davidson, 62, who stepped off a bus just ahead of the bulldozer as the rampage began, said.

The driver of the overturned bus, Assad Nadav, said he first thought the attack was an accident. “I opened the window to tell him to watch his driving. He looked me in the eye and drove towards the bus and then lifted it and turned it on its side,” he said.

An Australian tourist, Gina Hughes, described the sound of the bulldozer ramming into its side as “explosions.”

One woman whose car was in the bulldozer’s path was said to have saved her baby’s life by throwing it out of the window before being crushed.

Dozens of ambulances streamed in to fetch the wounded as medics worked in the streets. Two hours after the attack, heavy machinery was brought in to lift the bulldozer off the last car, which was flattened, with no hope of survival for the pregnant woman who was inside. The attack has led to threats of retaliatory measures against the families of such militants, including home demolitions, and threatens the cease-fire attempt between Israel and the Hamas-run Gaza Strip.

At least three Israelis are dead, with two more in serious condition and dozens of others taken to hospital with bruises, broken bones, cuts, and scrapes.

The attack was all the more extraordinary for showing that militants did not need guns or bombs to sow terror on the streets of Jerusalem, nor do they need to infiltrate from outside the city.

Israeli police believe Dwaith was acting alone, though the attack has been claimed by three Palestinian Arab militant groups including one that claims affiliation with Hezbollah.