Taffy Sassoon was going to get a piece of artwork framed Thursday morning when she felt the boom above her head.

"I heard this enormous blast, and I thought that it was a plane," says Mrs. Sassoon, trying to regain her composure after witnessing Thursday's suicide bombing here that killed 10 Israelis and wounded more than 50.

"Then I realized that the blast was too big and that it didn't come from the sky," she says. "The whole roof of the bus was gone. At first there was a kind of silence, and then an echoing of the blast. And then I could hear whimpering coming from the bus." Sassoon says she leaned the picture, a rare Chagall print, against a pole and rushed over to try to help the wounded. "I couldn't look," she says. "I realized that I didn't have the stomach to help." She is still stunned by the knowledge that, had she been crossing this key intersection of the upscale Rehavia neighborhood just a moment later, she might have lost her life, too.

Others things were lost Thursday in the wreckage of bus No. 19: other lives, but also other opportunities to make headway in the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate. The bombing cast a cloud over Thursday's historic prisoner release that had been brokered between Israel and Hizbullah, a Lebanon-based Muslim militant group. The release, three years in the making, raised expectations that there could be a small breakthrough here - potentially culminating in a meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia, widely known as Abu Ala.

Trilateral talks between US, Israeli and Palestinian officials, scheduled to take place Thursday afternoon, were canceled by Mr. Sharon's office. The talks were to focus on how to ease the economic strain on Palestinians imposed by Israeli travel restrictions on the West Bank and Gaza.

"On a difficult day like today, when innocent Israelis are murdered on the streets of Israel's capital, there is no room to talk about easing restrictions," Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom said in a statement. "It is up to the Palestinians to live up to their responsibilities to fight terror. Without that, there is no room for progress in the peace process."

Palestinian officials condemned the bombings, but quickly pointed to what they said was Israel's role in provoking the violence. "We cannot provide security through settlements and through walls," said senior Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat.

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