Dolphinarium discotheque suicide bombing
| Dolphinarium suicide bombing | |
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| Part of the Second Intifada militancy campaign | |
The abandoned ruins of the Dolphinarium in 2012.
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 The attack site
The attack site
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| Location | Tel Aviv, Israel |
| Coordinates | 32°04′02″N 34°45′42″E / 32.06722°N 34.76167°E |
| Date | 1 June 2001 23:30 pm (GMT+2) |
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Attack type
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Suicide bombing |
| Deaths | 21 victims (+1 bomber) |
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Non-fatal injuries
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100+ |
| Perpetrators |
Islamic Jihad Hamas |
| Assailant | Saeed Hotari |
The Dolphinarium discotheque massacre was a Hamas terror attack on 1 June 2001 in which a Hamas-affiliated Islamist terrorist blew himself up outside a nightclub on the beachfront in Tel Aviv, Israel, killing 21 Israelis, 16 of them teenagers. The majority of the victims were teenage girls, whose families had recently immigrated from the former Soviet Union.
Suicide bomber Saeed Hotari was standing in line on a Friday night in front of the Dolphinarium, when the area was packed with youngsters (most of them from Russian-speaking families) waiting for admission. Survivors of the attack later described how the young Palestinian bomber appeared to taunt his victims before the explosion, wandering among them dressed in a disguise that led his victims to mistake him for an Orthodox Jew from Asia. Before detonating his bomb, he banged a drum packed with explosives and ball-bearings, while taunting his victims in Hebrew with the words "Something's going to happen". At 23:27, he detonated his explosive device. Witnesses claimed that body parts lay all over the area, and that bodies were piled one above another on the sidewalk before being collected. Many civilians in the vicinity of the bombing rushed to assist emergency services.
The suicide bombing followed a failed attack attempt on the same target five months earlier.
One Israeli soldier and 20 civilians, the majority teenage girls whose parents had made aliyah to Israel from the former Soviet Union, were murdered in the attack:
Both Islamic Jihad and a group calling itself "Hezbollah-Palestine" originally claimed responsibility for the suicide bombing, only to later retract the claims. Later on it was revealed that the attack was carried out by Saeed Hotari, age 22, a militant linked to the Palestinian Islamist militant group Hamas.
Israel:
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Wikipedia