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Ninety people are injured in the attack on a pizza restaurant at a busy intersection.
By FLORE DE PRENEUF
© St. Petersburg Times, published August 10, 2001
JERUSALEM -- A mother is worried. She repeatedly dials her daughter's cell phone number. Hadar Adika, 20, is not answering. Her sister, Surit, is in tears: "I think she went to Sbarro," she says with a sob.
Sbarro Pizza, a popular fast food outlet with plate glass windows overlooking Jerusalem's busiest intersection, exploded about 2 p.m. (7 a.m. EDT) Thursday after a Palestinian walked in and detonated a large bomb. At least 15 people, including an American, were killed and more than 90 others were injured.
It was the deadliest terror attack in Jerusalem since the beginning of the intifada and the largest in Israel since a suicide bomber blew himself up at the entrance of a Tel Aviv nightclub on June 1.
Islamic Jihad, a militant Palestinian group, took responsibility for the attack. Israelis had been expecting a major terrorist attack since last week, when Palestinians promised revenge for the Israeli army's assassination of top Hamas activists, as well as the accidental killing of two children, in the West Bank town of Nablus.
But the attack seemed particularly vicious. Because of the timing -- lunchtime on a hot summer day -- the restaurant was packed with families and young people buying slices of pizza at the counter or sitting at tables, enjoying the air conditioning. Six of the dead and many of the wounded were children.
An hour after the attack, the intersection was littered with glass shards and bloody latex gloves left behind by medics. Two strollers were abandoned among the chairs and tables. A team of religious men combed the site for body parts so that they could be buried according to Jewish rites.
In the meantime, dozens of ambulances carried the dead and wounded to three hospitals. A boy wearing a Superman T-shirt was brought on a stretcher to Bikur Cholim, an emergency hospital just 100 yards from the scene of carnage.
"I saw a little kid whose head was totally blown up," said Aaron Lercher, 22, a medic who volunteered and boarded an ambulance as soon as he heard the news. "There were wounded people, blood everywhere. The whole restaurant was in pieces."
It was difficult to help, Lercher said, because of rumors that a second bomb was placed in a car nearby. That turned out to be a false alarm. "We were petrified ourselves," he said.
At the hospital, Hadar Adika's frantic mother suddenly burst out: "Thank God! She answered her phone!"
Adika was not at the pizzeria, it turns out, but shopping at a nearby pedestrian mall, which has also been the scene of terror attacks. Her mother and sister rushed from the hospital to find her.
Near the hospital entrance, Shifra Hoffman, a religious woman in her 60s, was still wondering.
"My husband eats at Sbarro all the time," she says, before launching into a diatribe against the Israeli government. In her left hand Hoffman clutches leaflets for Victims of Arab Terror, an association she founded at the beginning of the Oslo peace process.
"It's the Israeli government's fault because it has failed to stop the massacres. At Auschwitz we didn't have the means to protect ourselves. Now that we do, how come we don't do anything?" A nurse comes by to reassure her: Her husband's name is not on the list of those killed or wounded.
Most of the dead were Israelis, but the victims included at least one American, identified by police as Judith Greenbaum of New Jersey, and one Brazilian, Giora Balash. Their hometowns were not made public.
According to Floru Sharon, head of Bikur Cholim's emergency department, the injured sustained "blast wounds, burns, shrapnel wounds, fractures, combinations of all three, neurological damage, head trauma."
Dr. Raphi Pollack, an obstetrician at the hospital, treated a woman eight months pregnant who survived the blast unscathed but was worried for her unborn child. Another woman who was pushing her 6-month-old baby, Moses, in a stroller on the sidewalk opposite Sbarro at the time of the explosion collapsed in fear. She confided to Pollack that she was constantly afraid of going out and "couldn't take it any longer."
Pollack, the father of six children ages 3 to 18, sympathized. "You can't keep children locked up all the time, especially in the summer."
The conflict that began in September has killed more than 700 people, most of them Palestinian and Israeli civilians. Diplomatic efforts by the United States and European countries have failed so far to bring down the level of violence.
There seems to be no exit from the current cyclical war in which Palestinian terror attacks are followed by Israeli reprisal raids and "targeted killings" that generate, in turn, an even greater thirst for revenge.
After Thursday's attack, the option of an all-out military operation that would deal the Palestinians a hypothetically "final blow" seemed more alluring than ever to many Israelis.
"That's why we maintain a large army, to have a military solution for these things," said Pollack, 43. "If not, we can scale back the army and have a large foreign ministry and that way I don't have to pay 60 percent of my income in taxes."
Early today, Palestinians said Israeli warplanes destroyed a Palestinian police building with missiles west of Ramallah in the West Bank. There were no casualties. The Israeli military had no immediate comment.
After the pizzeria bombing, Jerusalem Mayor Ehud Olmert came to inspect the damage and gave an apology of sorts. "There's nothing the government can do that it hasn't done already," he said. "In 90 percent of cases we're successful at preventing attacks. We'll try to be as good as we can."
He rejected the idea of putting more security forces on the streets of Jerusalem. "We can't live like this, with streets full of security people," Olmert said. "We can't change our lifestyle."
Then, turning toward the world's camera crews, he addressed a message to the Palestinians: "Don't shoot at innocent people," he said. "We have no war against the people of Nablus or Ramallah. We have a war against terrorists."
-- Information from the Associated Press was included in this report.