An Egged bus trudged toward an Israeli settlement in the Gaza Strip. It carried soldiers returning from leave and three American college girls heading for a spring vacation at a Mediterranean resort.

Kesari Ruza dozed as the bus wound through desert scrub fields toward a settlement called Kfar Darom. Her friend, Alisa Flatow, sat in the window seat next to her, and Chava Knapp sat in the row behind them.

A van raced up on the opposite side of the bus. Its 24-year- old driver blew up the van. Ruza remembers a noise, like someone was pelting the bus with rocks, and then heard a commotion as people shouted to get down.

She doesn't remember seeing a fireball. But shrapnel went flying.

Ruza was cut badly on her hands and head. But she walked away. Flatow, seated to her left and farther from the blast, suffered a severe head injury and died a short time later.

``I looked over, and Alisa's head had fallen toward me,'' Ruza said in an interview. ``Her eyes rolled back in her head. I realized something very bad had just happened. She wasn't conscious.''

She assumes she survived because she was shorter and perhaps slouched over in the seat as she catnapped. Whatever hit Alisa may have gone right over her.

She and Knapp went to the hospital, identified Flatow for officials there and took a taxi back to their Jerusalem apartment that night.

The Palestinian Islamic Jihad issued a statement that day claiming credit for the attack, which killed seven others and injured 40 people. The bomber, Khalid al-Khatib, was one of theirs, the Islamic Jihad statement said.

The statement was faxed to Tampa, where it was received by Ramadan Abdullah Shallah, a University of South Florida adjunct professor, a 53-count federal indictment states. Shallah forwarded the fax to the World and Islam Studies Enterprise office in Temple Terrace a minute later, the indictment says.

Prosecutors portray the WISE office as part of a cover for Palestinian Islamic Jihad members working in the United States. Six of the nine defendants named in the indictment are accused of being members of the Islamic Jihad Shura Council, essentially a board of directors for the terrorist group.

Enter Sami Al-Arian

Former USF Professor Sami Al-Arian is at the case's focus. He incorporated WISE and other entities alleged to be Palestinian Islamic Jihad support operations, and he brought Shallah to the United States.

Shallah became the Islamic Jihad's general secretary - its commander - about six months after the attack that killed Flatow. He remains in that post today and is among the nine named defendants, four of whom go on trial today on charges including racketeering, conspiracy and providing material support to terrorists.

Attacks such as the one that killed Flatow and injured Ruza are the Palestinian Islamic Jihad's specialty. The group, formed in 1979 by Palestinian college students studying in Egypt, remains a relatively small, secretive organization that exists to attack.

Its work continues. An Islamic Jihad spokesman claimed credit for the Feb. 25 suicide bombing in Tel Aviv that killed five people and threatened a truce Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas has struggled to attain.

These attacks attract media attention and some public sympathy, academic experts say. But the Islamic Jihad remains the smallest of the Palestinian militant movements, with supporters numbering in the hundreds. Its ideology may be anti-Western and anti- American, but its attacks never have specifically targeted American citizens or property, and its focus is solely on Palestine.

``They have been so determined and so focused on the Palestinian theater,'' said Fawaz Gerges, a Sarah Lawrence College professor and author of the forthcoming book ``The Jihadists.''

``They have no interest in extending their activities outside the Free Palestine theater.''

Impatience Spawned Fighting

Hamas, by contrast, is larger and better-known. It operates schools, mosques, clinics and even sports clubs.

That follows the model established by the Muslim Brotherhood, an 80-year-old religious society that seeks to enact religious law. But it believes armed struggle must wait for the society to complete an Islamic revival.

Islamic Jihad followers grew impatient with that thinking and wanted to take the fight to Israel immediately, wrote Palestinian scholar and legislator Ziad Abu Amr in his 1994 book ``Islamic Fundamentalism in the West Bank and Gaza.''

The Brotherhood's approach is bottom-up, Gerges said. An educated, proselytized society triggers the change in government.

More radical groups such as Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah or al- Qaida are more top-down, Gerges said. ``They aim to take over a state and impose the law.''

That's what happened in Iran, when a 1979 revolution deposed Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi and instilled a Muslim theocracy led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Student protesters seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran, taking 52 Americans hostage for the next 444 days.

Palestinian medical student Fathi Shikaki was enthralled by the power shift.

He wrote a book on the Ayatollah, ``Khomeini: The Islamic Solution and the Alternative,'' within months of the revolution. And he assembled a group of friends who also grew up poor in crowded Gaza refugee camps under Israeli occupation to form the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

By emulating the Iranians, Islamic Jihad founders hoped to cause Israel's destruction and to replace it with an Islamic state.

The First Intifada

Shikaki was a dreamer, said Reuven Paz, director of the Project for the Research of Radical Islam in Herzliya, Israel. The dream was using the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as a unifying force for the Muslim world.

Its internal manifesto advocates ``the rejection of any peaceful solution for the Palestinian cause, and the affirmation of the jihad solution and the martyrdom style as the only choices for liberation.''

It also refers to America in Khomeini-like language, calling it ``the Great Satan'' and portraying the West as a threat to Islam.

Islamic Jihad founders returned to Israeli-occupied territories in the early 1980s, focusing on writing ideological papers and building a following, Paz said.

Its earliest known attack came in 1986, when a grenade was hurled in the middle of a graduation ceremony for new Israeli soldiers at Jerusalem's Western Wall. The father of one soldier was killed.

The group claims credit for launching the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising against Israeli occupation, in 1987. Four Islamic Jihad members broke out of jail, launching a spree of attacks before being cornered by Israeli authorities in a refugee camp called Shujaiyah.

The resulting shootout in October 1987 triggered the uprising, Islamic Jihad leaders claim. Other observers place the intifada's start about two months later.

Islamic Jihad spiritual leader Abdel Aziz Awda chose the earlier date as ``the true beginning of the Intifada'' during remarks he made at the second conference of Al-Arian's Islamic Committee for Palestine in 1989. Action was needed because ``those who spoke of the possibility of coexistence were of a louder voice than those who spoke of the necessity and inevitability of the cessation of Israel,'' a government translation of Awda's remarks reads.

But violence against Israel is not terrorism, Awda said a few minutes later.

``We undertake jihad against an enemy that has occupied our land,'' he said.

The group turned to suicide bombings, primarily targeting public buses or bus stops, in the early 1990s. Among the more infamous was a January 1995 attack at a bus stop in Beit Lid, Israel. Two suicide bombers targeted a bus stop and snack bar, killing 22 people.

It came on the heels of diplomatic efforts to ease the Middle East conflict and prompted President Clinton to sign an executive order freezing the assets of 12 terrorist groups and 18 designated terrorists and prohibiting any financial support for them.

The order created some confusion for Islamic Jihad's rival group Hamas, because it provides a host of social services in addition to waging attacks. But the Palestinian Islamic Jihad deliberately eschewed social programs, and according to the indictment, members rejected suggestions in 1994 to change course to be more like Hamas.

The Islamic Jihad nearly fell apart the following year. Shikaki was gunned down in Malta in October 1995 in an attack attributed to Israel. He was the group's charismatic leader and its center of power.

Islamic Jihad attacks diminished for several years, returning in 2000 around the outbreak of a second intifada. Attacks in this period were more coordinated, and often the product of cooperation among rival terrorist groups.

Armed Struggle Or Peace Process

Ideology was less important in the more recent uprising, Paz said. It was replaced by the notion that people had ``to choose between armed struggle or the peace process.'' While the indictment alleges the Tampa group raised money for Islamic Jihad, its primary financial support comes from Iran. U.S. officials estimated Iran gave Islamic Jihad about $2 million annually during the mid-1990s. Prosecutors have not offered an estimate of how much money they think flowed from the United States to Islamic Jihad. The 22 financial counts in the indictment involve $43,420 in wire transfers and payments in 2002 and 2003.

Several hundred thousand dollars more is described moving in and out of Tampa in the indictment, dating back to 1992.

That state support keeps the group viable despite its small size, said Magnus Ranstorp, director of Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St Andrews in Scotland.

``They are quite dangerous because they have to follow their paymaster,'' Ranstorp said.

FBI Director Robert Mueller testified Feb. 16 before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The 2003 indictments ``severely undercut'' Islamic Jihad activities in the United States, Mueller said. ``There has been no indication of a new U.S. Islamic Jihad leadership since the arrest of Al-Arian.''

But the Islamic Jihad will live on no matter what happens in federal court, Paz said.

``People know who is Fathi Shikaki and Ramadan Shallah,'' Paz said. ``They don't know Sami Al-Arian. He was never living here.''

Prosecutors argue that Al- Arian helped keep the Islamic Jihad intact. The indictment identifies him as the Islamic Jihad governing board's secretary. It details a series of moves in 1994 that tried to heal an internal rift and improve the group's accounting. It also alleges that he played a role in writing and editing the Islamic Jihad manifesto.

Despite surviving an Islamic Jihad attack, Ruza never knew there was an alleged U.S. connection to the group until an FBI agent called her about a year ago. She received a subpoena to testify about a month ago.

Ruza said she hasn't paid much attention to the case. She said her experience increased her appreciation for life and provided a recognition that it can be short. She said it didn't make her obsess or turn to religion. Rather, she's wary of extremism in any form.

``I have a greater appreciation for avoiding a life that is so strongly built on ideology rather than personal meaning,'' she said. ``Any ideological extremism is dangerous.''