Posted on 06/20/2002 6:24:10 PM PDT by TheOtherOne
By CELEAN JACOBSON
Associated Press Writer
June 20, 2002, 8:23 PM EDT
JERUSALEM --
Hours before her death in a suicide attack, 5-year-old Gal Eizenman was jumping around, a blond bundle of joy at a children's musical performance organized by her grandmother Noah Alon, 59.
A videotape of the occasion shows the two of them happy and dancing. Later, the tape was used to give details of what Gal and her grandmother were wearing so their bodies could be identified.
The two were killed when a Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up at a crowded bus stop in northern Jerusalem on Wednesday evening. In all, seven Israelis were killed in the attack. About 50 people were injured, including Eizenman's mother and 18-month-old brother.
"The two most energetic women in our family, my mother and my niece, are gone in the blink of an eye," Alon's other daughter, Ifat, told Israel Army Radio.
On Thursday, family and friends gathered in a hushed group outside Alon's home to pass on condolences.
As mourners watched, paramedics returned Gal's mother to the hospital, lifting her into an ambulance, evidence of the bombing still visible in the scars on her face.
Later, addressing a crowd outside the Ofra synagogue, the bodies wrapped in prayer shawls before him, Hanoch Alon, Noah Anon's husband, spoke of the loss of his loved ones.
"Noah, my beloved wife, your sudden death ... leaves a terrible gaping emptiness," he said. His granddaughter was "the most beautiful flower in our world, cut from us."
As commuters waited in the early evening for buses to take them home, the bomber charged at the bus stop, setting off the explosives he carried in a tightly packed bag strapped across his shoulder.
The bomb wrecked the bus stop and left the wide street littered with personal belongings and body parts. Rescue workers covered an overturned baby carriage with black plastic sheeting.
"I heard a tremendous boom. I saw people go up in the air, and everything turned black, with smoke," said Geula Mizrahi, 35, who was in a car near the bus stop.
Eizenman and her family were on the way home from the end-of-year kindergarten party in Ofra, a Jewish settlement about 20 miles north of Jerusalem in the West Bank. Alon was a kindergarten teacher in the settlement.
They had traveled in an armored bus from Ofra to the French Hill intersection in Jerusalem from where they were to catch another bus to their home in a West Bank settlement east of the city. As they crossed the street to the bus stop, the bomber blew himself up.
Eizenman's aunt Ifat said the child and her mother had arrived at the performance about an hour early. "That child was bursting with energy. During the party she sat on my lap."
At the end of the concert, Gal stood next to her grandmother as Alon delivered a short speech.
On May 27, another suicide bomber killed a grandmother, 56-year-old Ruth Peled, and her 18-month-old granddaughter, Sinai Kenaan, in an attack on an ice cream parlor in the outskirts of Tel Aviv.
In another tragic tale, two orphaned sisters, Shuval and Shagal Shemesh, ages 7 and 3, lost their adopted grandfather in a suicide bombing on Tuesday, three months after their parents were killed in another attack in Jerusalem.
At the time, the girls' parents, Gadi and Tzippi, had left a clinic where an ultrasound test showed their mother was five months pregnant with twins.
The two girls were adopted by Gadi's sister Anat whose father-in-law Baruch Graoni, 60, was among the 17 people killed in Tuesday's bombing on a bus.
Copyright © 2002, The Associated Press
Civilized people should not have to live like this.
I have tried to understand their point of view, but I can't. NOTHING, absolutely NOTHING can justify what they are doing and how they are doing it.
They, and anyone who tries to justify them, are beneath contempt.
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