Ben Yehuda Street Bombings

The February 22, 1948, bombing occurred during the six months between approval of the United Nations partition plan and Israel’s declaration of independence, in the period leading into the War of Independence.[1] Jerusalem’s Jewish community faced attacks on supply convoys traveling from the coast, and Jewish Jerusalem was under virtual siege.[6] British troops did little or nothing to prevent those assaults on the road, while fighting within Jerusalem involved Jewish forces, Arab forces, and the British army during the final months of the Mandate.[6][1]

An earlier bombing struck the building housing The Palestine Post, later known as The Jerusalem Post, on February 1, 1948.[7] At approximately 11 p.m., a stolen British police car loaded with explosives was driven to the front of the newspaper’s building.[7] A second car arrived shortly afterward, and one of its passengers lit the fuse before leaving.[7] Three people were killed and 30 wounded; although the three-story building largely remained standing, flying lead, shattered glass, and fire caused casualties.[7] This was a separate attack from the February 22 destruction on Ben Yehuda Street.[7][1]

The newspaper’s staff responded by treating the wounded and continuing publication.[7] Survivor and historian Alexander Zvielli later encountered deputy editor Ted Lurie’s wife on Ben Yehuda Street, where she urged the shaken staff to carry on: “All right, we’re putting out a paper.”[7] An abridged edition appeared the following morning, and the newspaper was operating normally again by the end of the week.[7] The episode preceded the much larger street bombing later that month and formed part of the violence confronting Jerusalem’s Jewish institutions before independence.[7][1]

Ben Yehuda Street and its immediate surroundings subsequently remained targets over several decades.[1] The February 1948 bombing was the first of approximately a dozen attacks directed at civilians on or near the street over the following 55 years.[1] A later retrospective identified lethal attacks associated with the street in 1948, 1975, 1976, 1979, 1997, and 2001.[8] The nearby July 4, 1975, refrigerator bombing was specifically located at Zion Square, rather than on Ben Yehuda Street itself, and killed 14 people and injured 80.[2] By the time of the 1997 and 2001 attacks, the targeted location was a crowded downtown pedestrian shopping mall.[4][9]

Early on February 22, 1948, explosive-laden military vehicles arrived on Ben Yehuda Street, near its intersection with Ben Hillel Street.[10] British army deserters participated alongside Arab attackers, using British military vehicles and uniforms.[1] The vehicles passed through checkpoints on the way into Jerusalem before the attackers left them and escaped.[10] At approximately 6:30 a.m., the vehicles exploded after their occupants had fled.[11]

The convoy included an armored vehicle as well as trucks, and descriptions of the operation identify British deserters working with Arab forces.[1][12] One account names ‘Azmi al-Ja’uni as the convoy’s leader and Eddie Brown and Peter Madison as participating British deserters.[12] Another reconstruction describes eyewitnesses seeing two military Dodge trucks arrive near the Atlantic Hotel, one following the other after an interval of several minutes.[13] Suspicion arose when smoke emerged from one truck and men wearing British police uniforms ran away.[13]

According to a Ma’ariv retrospective, the trucks had been prepared at Imwas in the Latrun enclave, and the intended target included Palmach convoy escorts staying at the Atlantic Hotel.[13] The charges devastated the surrounding civilian area, bringing down buildings and damaging others nearby.[13] The Atlantic Hotel and the building housing the Alno café were destroyed, while dozens of other buildings sustained damage.[11] The blast was heard across much of Jerusalem, and windows shattered as far away as Rehavia and Geula.[14] Among the dead were refugees who had been staying temporarily in hotels after earlier attacks destroyed their homes.[15]

As many as 58 Jewish civilians were killed, with approximately 140 to 200 people wounded in the principal account of the attack.[1] A later reconstruction gives 58 as the final death toll and describes dozens wounded.[14] The explosion destroyed homes as well as businesses, leaving residents and rescuers searching collapsed structures for people trapped beneath the debris.[13][16] An eyewitness remembered running to the ruined home of Zahava and Walter, where Zahava died of suffocation alongside five members of the Hass family.[16]

Nurse Bulisa Dana was among those caught in the destruction.[10] On the morning of February 22, she was walking to a WIZO infant-care home and detoured to a shoe-repair shop at Ben Yehuda 11.[10] She suffered a head injury and internal bleeding and asked rescuers to take her to Shaare Zedek because the staff there knew her.[10] She died at the age of 28.[10] Her story places an individual medical worker’s interrupted morning within the broader destruction of the street’s hotels, shops, and residential buildings.[10]

On September 4, 1997, three Hamas suicide bombers entered the crowded Ben Yehuda pedestrian mall carrying cases of powerful explosives.[4] Their bombs contained nails, screws, pieces of glass, and chemical poisons.[4] The explosions killed five civilians and wounded at least 181 people.[2][17] Hamas’s military wing, the Izz-el-Din al-Qassam Brigades, claimed responsibility.[17] A separate chronology counted eight deaths in total, explicitly including the three bombers, and described nearly 200 wounded.[18]

The five people killed were Yael Botwin, Sivan Zarka, and Smadar Elhanan, all aged 14; Rami Kozashvili, 20; and Eliahu Markowitz, 40.[19] All five were listed as residents of Jerusalem.[19] Botwin was also a United States citizen, and the American casualty reporting identified a 14-year-old American girl among those killed.[17][20] Seven United States citizens were wounded, and one of the dead was identified as a dual American-Israeli citizen.[18] Three of the five civilian fatalities were therefore school-age girls of the same age.[19]

On December 1, 2001, two suicide bombers detonated explosives in the crowded Ben Yehuda pedestrian mall at about 11:30 p.m.[19] A car bomb exploded nearby roughly 20 minutes later.[19][9] The attack killed 11 people and injured approximately 180, and Hamas claimed responsibility.[2] The initial reporting identified ten dead, with the later death of 17-year-old Ido Cohen on December 8 bringing the detailed fatality account to 11.[19]

A reconstruction places the first two detonations at Zion Square and the subsequent car bomb on Harav Kuk Street, near the pedestrian shopping area.[21] It identifies the suicide bombers as 25-year-old Osama Muhammad ‘Id Baher, a Hamas operative, and 24-year-old Nabil Muhammad Jamil Halbiyyah, identified as a member of Palestinian General Intelligence.[21] The car belonged to Nader Alyan, identified as a Palestinian Islamic Jihad operative.[21] This reconstruction attributes responsibility for the operation to Hamas.[21]

The car bomb caused additional casualties after the suicide explosions.[9] At least ten people were injured in that blast, including three seriously, in reporting published the next day.[9] Contemporary reporting raised the possibility that the car bomb was directed at first responders.[9] Police disputed reports that an anonymous caller had warned of the attack in advance.[9] Initial reporting recorded claims of responsibility by both Islamic Jihad and Hamas, while the government chronology and subsequent judicial material identified Hamas as responsible for the attack.[9][2]

The ten victims named in the initial December 2001 report were mostly young people from Jerusalem and the surrounding area.[9] Their ages ranged from 14 to 20, including two 15-year-olds and a 14-year-old.[9] A subsequent account placed the number injured at 188, while the first report had described more than 170 wounded.[22][9] As in 1997, young civilians formed a substantial part of the immediate human toll at the pedestrian mall.[19][9]

Rescuers searching the 1948 ruins formed a human chain to remove debris and locate victims.[13] The work continued for days, and the body of Shlomo Ossi was recovered on the third day.[13] Ossi had worked as a night watchman near the Orion Cinema.[13] His son later recalled that accounts gathered by the family described him calling on people to flee before he was killed by the collapse of a nearby building.[13] The recovery effort therefore extended beyond the first hours after the explosion into a prolonged search through the wreckage.[13]

Local volunteers joined the evacuation of the wounded.[23] One family memoir describes a member of Jerusalem’s People’s Guard who had finished guard duty and was returning home when the explosions occurred.[23] He rushed to the site and helped other volunteers carry away injured people.[23] A photograph caption in the same account identifies Yosef Menaker as participating in the evacuation of wounded children.[23] Such recollections preserve the response of neighborhood residents alongside accounts of the attack’s military vehicles and perpetrators.[23]

Burial arrangements were affected by the siege of Jerusalem.[16] An eyewitness account describes victims’ bodies remaining in the courtyard of Bikur Cholim Hospital for five days before British Mandate authorities permitted burial at Sanhedria Cemetery.[16] The Mount of Olives cemetery was inaccessible because the route passed through hostile Arab villages.[16] Another retrospective records an initial count of 49 people buried at Sanhedria before the eventual death toll reached 58.[13]

The bombing sharpened conflict over how Jewish forces should respond.[1][15] Abd al-Qadir, founder of the Organization for Holy Struggle and a commander during the 1936–39 Arab Revolt, claimed responsibility the following day and presented the attack as retaliation for an Irgun bombing in Ramle on February 19.[1] Many Jewish residents blamed the British.[1] Jewish national institutions and the Haganah called for restraint, while the Irgun and Lehi carried out attacks against British soldiers.[15]

The Irgun ordered attacks on British soldiers after the bombing; eight soldiers were fatally shot that day, and another later died in a Jewish clinic.[1] Lehi subsequently described its February 29 bombing of British troop-train cars near Rehovot as retaliation for the Ben Yehuda Street attack a week earlier.[24] After visiting the devastated street, David Ben-Gurion criticized groups including the Irgun and Lehi, saying, “I could not forget that our thugs and murderers had opened the way.”[1] The attack intensified the three-way fighting among Jews, Arabs, and British forces during the Mandate’s final months.[1]

For survivors of the 1997 bombing, the consequences included permanent physical injuries.[4] Noam Rozenman sustained burns over 40 percent of his body and more than 100 shrapnel entry wounds.[4] He spent six weeks in hospital and was left with tinnitus, perforated eardrums, scarring, and nerve damage.[4] His injuries illustrate the lasting effects of the explosive devices and their embedded fragments beyond the immediate fatality and hospitalization figures.[4]

Israeli police arrested and charged Hamas operatives Muaid Said Bilal and Omar Abdel Rahman al-Zaban for participating in the 1997 attack.[4] An Israeli court later convicted both men of multiple counts of murder, attempted murder, and active membership in Hamas.[4] Victims also pursued civil litigation in the United States.[4] In that proceeding, the defendants failed to appear or respond, and the court held an evidentiary hearing in January 2003 before granting the plaintiffs’ motions for default judgment.[4]

The resulting findings held that Hamas had received material support and resources from Iran and that Iranian support was provided for the purpose of carrying out extrajudicial killings, including the 1997 bombing.[4] Those findings followed the court’s assessment of the plaintiffs’ evidence at the hearing.[4] A later report described a United States appeals-court ruling requiring Iran to pay $9.4 million to victims’ families in the case under discussion.[5] The legal aftermath thus included both Israeli criminal convictions of participants and American civil proceedings over support for Hamas.[4][5]

The 2001 attack also became the subject of civil proceedings concerning material support for Hamas.[25] A United Kingdom High Court judgment quoted findings from an American judgment identifying Hamas as the organization that orchestrated and carried out the December 1 bombing at the Ben Yehuda pedestrian mall.[25] The quoted judgment found that Iran and its Ministry of Intelligence and Security had provided material support to Hamas and that civil conspiracy supplied a basis for liability in that case.[25] These proceedings addressed responsibility beyond the suicide bombers themselves.[25]

The ruined Darom bookshop became one of the most distinctive records of the 1948 bombing’s cultural losses.[3] The day after the explosion, its owner, Michel Yitzhak Rabinowitz, collected charred and bloodstained pages from the wreckage.[3] He had built the shop around manuscripts and rare books brought from Russia.[3] After his death several months later, his daughters donated the books he had kept at home, together with his archive, to the National Library of Israel.[3] Surviving material from his private collection therefore outlasted the destruction of the business on Ben Yehuda Street.[3]

The Photo Schwartz photography business was also destroyed in the 1948 attack.[26] Negatives and reprints stored at Trudy Schwartz’s home were all that remained of the couple’s business.[26] Hundreds of additional negatives were later discovered in boxes at her home.[26] Like Rabinowitz’s books and archive, these photographic materials survived because they had been kept away from the premises destroyed by the explosion.[3][26]

The recovery of individual victims’ histories continued long afterward.[10] Bulisa Dana’s grave on the Mount of Olives was lost to her family for decades.[10] In 2009, her niece renewed the search using a burial register, and the family eventually located the grave and added a headstone.[10] Her story links the immediate medical and personal losses of February 1948 with a later effort to restore a named victim’s place in family memory.[10]

Accounts of the 1948 bombing preserve different perspectives: eyewitness descriptions of collapsed homes, family recollections of rescue work, retrospective reconstructions of the convoy, and the physical remnants of destroyed businesses.[16][23] The attack was remembered as a severe physical and psychological blow to Jerusalem’s Jewish community during the War of Independence.[14] Its place at the beginning of a succession of civilian-targeting attacks on or near Ben Yehuda Street also connects it to the later bombings of the pedestrian mall.[1]

The principal historical disputes concern the 1948 perpetrators’ precise composition and motives, rather than the occurrence or destructive scale of the bombing.[1][12] Abd al-Qadir’s claim of responsibility and stated retaliatory rationale coexisted with accusations against the British, whose government initially denied responsibility.[1][12] Accounts identify Arab participants and British deserters but differ over the number of vehicles and individuals involved.[1][24] Responsibility for the separate February 1 Palestine Post bombing likewise remained unresolved: the perpetrators were never apprehended, despite a claim by Abd al-Kadir al-Husseini and accounts implicating British deserters and bomb-maker Fawzi el-Kutub.[7]

Casualty figures require attention to dates and counting conventions.[18][19] For 1997, the five civilian deaths and eight total deaths are compatible when the latter explicitly includes the three suicide bombers.[17][18] For 2001, the detailed fatality chronology records ten initial deaths and Ido Cohen’s death a week later.[19] Injury totals nevertheless vary. One State Department chronology reports 120 wounded, while another State Department report gives 188.[27][28] A gov.il chronology lists 180 injured.[2] The Iranian-support findings concerning 1997 should also be understood as findings in a civil default proceeding, entered after an evidentiary hearing, rather than as criminal convictions of the absent defendants.[4]