In a guest New York Times op-ed entitled "A Terrorist’s Teenage Target" published after the heinous terrorist bombing in Manchester, Tanya Weiz writes of the 2001 Dolphinarium discoteque attack in Tel Aviv:
"Tanya [a friend with the same name] and I got into the line on the left-hand side of the door; Oksana and Liana went to the right so we could all get in faster. Then, at 11:44 p.m., a Hamas suicide bomber blew himself up at the entrance to the club.
Everything went mute. To this day, I don’t know if I lost consciousness. All I know is that I had flown some distance in the air, and everywhere I looked there were dead bodies. It seemed that every single person in that line had been murdered except for me. Liana died on the spot. A total of 21 people were killed, 16 of them were teenagers."
I believe a few words about the Hamas suicide bomber, Saeed Hotari, are in order. Jamal Halaby wrote in a June 4, 2001 Guardian article entitled "Bomber went to West Bank for a better life":
"The suicide bomber was an observant Muslim who moved to the West Bank two years ago in search for a better job, his father said yesterday.
Saeed Hotari, 22, one of nine children from a poor Palestinian family living in Jordan, is believed to be the man who killed himself and 19 Israeli teenagers in a Tel Aviv disco on Friday. This has not yet been confirmed officially.
'I am very happy and proud of what my son did and I hope all the men of Palestine and Jordan would do the same,' Hassan Hotari said yesterday, with tears in his eyes.
At the entrance of a narrow street leading to hi[s] home in Zarqa, a predominantly Palestinian city 17 miles north-east of the capital, Amman, signs directed people to the home of 'martyr Saeed Hotari'."
Saeed Hotari a "martyr"? His father proud of this killer of teenagers? Why am I not surprised?
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