Guest
In October 2011, Ahlam Tamimi, a female Jordanian Terrorist helped plan and assist in a horrific 2001 suicide bombing in Israel, was released from an Israeli jail as part of the Palestinian prisoner exchange for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. Tamimi had been serving 16 life sentences for her role in the August 9, 2001 suicide bombing of Sbarro's pizzeria in Jerusalem, a suicide bombing that killed 15 Israelis and wounded over 130 others. Among the murdered victims were eight children, a pregnant woman and another woman who was left in a permanent coma. At the time of the killing, Tamimi was a 20-year-old Jordanian national who lived in Ramallah, studied at Birzeit University, and worked as a television journalist. She was also the first woman to have been recruited by Hamas' Izzadine el-Qassam, the military wing of Hamas that launched 138 suicide attacks against Israeli military and civilian targets during the al-Aqsa Intifada from 2000-2004, killing over 1,064 Israelis and wounding 7,462 others. While Tamimi's most visible role in the Sbarro operation was to transport the suicide bomber to the target, in reality she was intimately involved in its entire planning, including intelligence gathering, reconnaissance, and target selection. Needless to say, Tamimi — whose fellow co-conspirator in the Sbarro bombing, Mohammad Daghlas, was also released as part of the prisoner swap — was ecstatic about her good fortune, declaring upon her release: It's a brilliant move of the Hamas negotiators to include my name in the swap deal although the Israeli military Courts recommended not to include my name in any prisoners swap in the future. If anyone had entertained the idea that Tamimi's ten years in prison may have engendered in her a feeling of remorse about her viscous actions, those ideas were quickly disabused in a television interview she gave in Jordan on October 19, 2011. When asked by the interviewer if “she would carry out the attack today,“ Tamimi defiantly responded: “Of course, I do not regret what happened. Absolutely not. This is the path. I dedicated myself to Jihad for the sake of Allah, and Allah granted me success. You know how many casualties there were [in the 2001 attack on the Sbarro pizzeria]? This was made possible by Allah. Do you want me to denounce what I did? That's out of the question. I would do it again today, and in the same manner. The manner by which Tamimi carried out the attack on Sbarro's was both chilling in its details and terrifying in its effects. As part of her intelligence gathering, Tamimi had picked Sbarro's precisely because it was unguarded and would be filled with patrons, most of whom were children and young mothers. Apparently, Tamimi's choice satisfied Ezziddin Al-Masri, the operation's suicide bomber. In a later interview after her arrest, Tamimi said the only question he had asked her was: “Will there be religious Jews there?“ which she answered in the affirmative.“
