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May 23, 2003/Iyar 21 5763, Vol. 55, No. 39
Terror victims often immigrants, Arabs
GIL SEDAN
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
JERUSALEM - Last Friday, on the way to work from Pisgat Ze'ev, my home neighborhood in Jerusalem, I noticed an armed guard standing by bus stop No. 6.
At last, I said to myself, people can board a bus in Jerusalem with a sense of security.
Two days later, a suicide bomber managed to board bus No. 6, killing seven and wounding 20.
Within a 48-hour span beginning the night of May 17, 12 Israelis were murdered in three suicide attacks and dozens were wounded.
The thing about terror attacks is that you don't really grasp the horror unless you have witnessed one, or until you hear the stories of the victims' families.
Pisgat Ze'ev borders a number of Arab neigh-borhoods. Most of its residents are new immigrants from the former Soviet Union.
Shimon Ostinsky, 67, used to come to work in a parking lot near the Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem's Old City, arriving 15 minutes before the lot opened.
He never missed a shift, thankful for the opportunity to be employed at his age - even though back home in Kiev he had been a lecturer in economics.
Ostinsky left a wife, two children and two grand-children.
Some observers noted that, given the terrorists' propensity to blow up buses because of the high number of casualties, the price of attacks is being paid by a particular socioeconomic sector that can't afford other means of transpor-tation.
One bereaved Israeli said this became acutely clear to him during a recent visit to his son's grave.
"I looked around me, and what did I see? Graves of new immigrants, children and soldiers," said Yossi Men-delevitch, whose son Yuval, 13, was killed in a bus bombing in Haifa earlier this year.
The terrorists don't dis-tinguish by age or race; they murder Arabs, too.
One of the victims was Ghaleb Tawil, 42, a resident of the Shuafat refugee camp, located within Jerusalem's municipal boundaries.
Tawil was on his way to work at the Hadassah Medical Center in Ein Kerem. Though he had experience as a construction worker, he preferred to work as a cleaning man at the hospital: It made it easier to be close to his 12-year-old daughter, who was often hospitalized due to leukemia.
Tawil left two wives and nine children.
The next day, a bombing at a shopping mall in Afula took the lives of yet another Arab - Hassan Tawat'ha, 41, of Jisser a Zarka.
The terrorist - believed to be a woman - arrived at the shopping mall shortly after 5 p.m.
She ascended the steps leading and approached Kiril Sheremenko, the guard at the entrance. Sheremenko, 23, whisked the woman with a magnometer, which started whistling loudly.
He signaled to Hadar Gitlin, a female guard standing behind him, to help him search the woman. But the woman then deto- nated her bomb, killing Sheremenko in his first day at work - his first hour, in fact.
JTA correspondent Naomi Segal in Jerusalem contri buted to this story.
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