June 1: On This Day in World History … briefly
Witnesses claimed that body parts lay all over the area, and that bodies were piled one above another on the sidewalk before being collected.
2001: Terrorist attack at Israeli disco kills 16 teenagers
The Dolphinarium discotheque massacre was a Hamas terror attack on June 1, 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 Israeli 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 teenagers. Most of the crowd were young people from Russian-speaking families from the former Soviet Union, who were waiting for admission to a dance party at the disco and others were in line to enter the adjacent nightclub.
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 23.27pm, he detonated his explosive device. 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. Since the bombing, the Dolphinarium discotheque sat abandoned on the Tel Aviv beachfront, covered with graffiti until its demolition in May 2018. For years, family members of victims had unsuccessfully campaigned to permanently preserve the ruined building as a monument to the attack; however, the building was demolished in order to extend the promenade along the coast. Memorial services to the victims of the attack were held every year at the site by friends and family of the victims.
Most notable historic snippets or facts extracted from the book ‘On This Day’ first published in 1992 by Octopus Publishing Group Ltd, London, as well as additional supplementary information extracted from Wikipedia.
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