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| Scene of this morning’s successful intercept. The corner building on the right is where the Sbarro pizzeria was located fifteen years ago [Image Source] |
It’s hard for us to observe what went on in the center of Jerusalem during this morning’s rush hour and not make comparisons with events at the very same location almost exactly fifteen years ago.
Here’s how Times of Israel is currently reporting today’s drama in a still-unfolding terror attack:
Police in downtown Jerusalem on Sunday morning arrested a man who was carrying explosives in his backpack. The suspect, identified as a West Bank Palestinian, was detained near the light rail stop on Jaffa Road after he raised the suspicion of a security guard. Police said the man was standing “behind the stop, with a bag in his hand.” When the guard asked to examine the contents of the bag, he noticed a bomb and called police. Sappers were promptly deployed to the scene and the road was closed off, along with the adjacent King George Street. Police said the man was found to be carrying “a number of pipe bombs” and had been arrested and taken in for questioning. A video from the scene showed police pointing their guns at the suspect, who lay on the ground near the train stop. A second clip showed sappers strip-searching him, apparently for explosives. Media reports said the man was a resident of Beit Ula, near Hebron in the West Bank. Police said he was “in his 20s.”
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| The human bomb, lying prone on the ground at the light rail stop today, with security personnel pointing guns at him from every direction [Image Source: Video] |
On August 9, 2001, a human bomb, dispatched by Hamas under the management of a female Hamas agent, came to the very same spot.
The instructions he had been given (as we know from the public, first-person testimony of the woman who managed and engineered the massacre) were to explode the contents of the guitar case on his back right in the center of the intersection of King George and Yafo, Jerusalem’s busiest corner. He must have noticed that there were more people – and in particular more children – inside the Sbarro pizzeria whose all-glass facade looked out onto that intersection. so ignored what he had been told and walked an additional few meters into the fast-food place on the corner which was filled with youngsters on school summer vacation.
The explosion, at 2:00 pm, took the lives of fifteen people, most of them children. More than 130 were seriously injured, many of them standing outside the pizzeria where today’s intercept occurred. (There was no Jerusalem Light Rail in 2001, and therefore no light rail station. Today’s human bomb was stopped and stripped on the light rail station platform.)
An incredible decision taken by the government of Israel on that awful day fifteen days ago to avoid notifying the public of what the intelligence services know – that a human bomb was making his way to Jerusalem at that very hour – meant that many people, especially children, and specifically including our daughter Malki who was 15 when she was killed in the explosion, had no idea of the mortal danger they faced by being in the center of town.
Thankfully, with the greatly-heightened awareness and aggressive security measures that have been adopted by Israel over the years in the face of overt incitement to and encouragement of terror by the Mahmoud Abbas regime and its fellow travelers, no one was hurt in today’s attempt jihad attack. Not even the jihadist fanatic.
But it could so easily have ended so very differently.
Postscript: Assuming he’s convicted, this morning’s thwarted human bomb starts earning Rewards for Terror cash from the Palestinian Authority via its malevolent, ever-so-slightly-disguised prisoner payments authority. The funding all comes from European and American foreign aid. His future, and that of his dependents, is secure.
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