25 Years After Sbarro: The Jerusalem Pizza Bombing We Need to Remember

Takeaways

• A Hamas suicide bomber murdered families eating lunch in Jerusalem on August 9, 2001.
• Eight children were among the sixteen people killed that afternoon.
• The bomb was packed with nails, screws, and bolts to maximize suffering.
• One of the planners now walks free in Jordan, on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.
• Twenty-five years later, the attack still explains why peace requires more than paper.

It was a Thursday afternoon in downtown Jerusalem, August 9, 2001. It was the kind of ordinary lunch hour when a pizzeria on a busy corner fills with mothers feeding toddlers, teenagers grabbing a slice on their way somewhere else, and a pregnant woman resting near the window before the rest of her errands.

Inside a guitar case left near the entrance of the Sbarro restaurant, at the corner of King George Street and Jaffa Road, a bomb packed with nails, screws, and bolts was waiting for that lunchtime crowd to gather.

A Bombing Built for Maximum Death

When Hamas suicide bomber Izz al-Din Shuheil al-Masri detonated the device that afternoon, the shrapnel tore through a small, enclosed space crowded with families who had no idea they were the target of a plan months in the making. 

Sixteen people died, including eight children, and roughly 130 more were wounded, some of them disfigured for life. Among the dead was the entire Schijveschuurder family, a mother, a father, and three children between the ages of two and fourteen, wiped out together at one table, along with fifteen-year-old Malki Roth and a pregnant American woman named Shoshana Greenbaum, whose unborn child died with her.

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A Peace Process That Bought Time for Terror

What makes Sbarro different from a random act of violence is the political moment it interrupted. Only a year earlier, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak had traveled to Camp David and offered Yasser Arafat the outline of a Palestinian state, including a share of Jerusalem and most of Judea and Samaria, a proposal that Arafat rejected outright before launching the wave of terrorism that came to be known as the Second Intifada. 

Sbarro was not an isolated tragedy within that campaign but one of its signature atrocities, made possible in part by the autonomy and freedom of movement that the Oslo Accords had granted to the very factions, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Arafat’s own Fatah, that turned around and used it to plan mass murder.

The Woman Who Smiled

The lack of remorse from those who carried out the bombing is, if anything, harder to sit with than the bombing itself. Ahlam Tamimi, then a twenty-year-old university student affiliated with Hamas, scouted the Sbarro location and personally guided al-Masri to the site before the attack, and when a journalist later told her that she had helped kill eight children rather than the three she originally believed, she reportedly smiled. 

She now lives openly in Jordan, hosts a talk show on a Hamas-affiliated channel, and remains on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Terrorists list while Amman continues to refuse American demands for her extradition.

 

Why This Anniversary Still Matters, 25 Years Later

Sbarro stands as a rebuke to every plan that assumes terror can be negotiated into retirement rather than defeated. 

The Hebrew Bible names what happened at that pizzeria in stark terms: “The blood of your brother cries out to Me from the ground” (Genesis 4:10). 

That cry has not gone quiet in twenty-five years, and it will not go quiet as long as people like Tamimi are treated as celebrities rather than criminals, and as long as new peace frameworks are built on the same hope that failed so completely before an August lunch hour in 2001 turned into a massacre of children.

Want to keep reading? Find out here how Israel is teaching the West how to fight global terrorism. Explore more on faith, values, and the Land of Israel at Sinai Project.