Patt Junction bus bombing

On the morning of June 18, 2002, at approximately 7:50 a.m., a Palestinian suicide bomber boarded Egged bus line 32A in Jerusalem. The bus had originated in the Gilo neighborhood and stopped at Beit Safafa, an Arab neighborhood of the city, before the bomber got on. He detonated an explosive belt at the front of the bus during the morning rush hour, as schoolchildren and commuters were traveling from Gilo toward downtown Jerusalem. The device was reportedly packed with metal balls and nails to maximize shrapnel injuries. The blast lifted the bus off the ground, tore off its roof, and sent bodies through the windows. Twenty people were killed, including the bomber, and more than 74 others were wounded. Of the dead, 17 were residents of the Gilo neighborhood.

The Palestinian Islamist organization Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack. The bomber was identified as Muhammad al-Ghoul, a 22-year-old student at An-Najah National University in Nablus, who came from Bethlehem. Two residents of the East Jerusalem suburb of Jabel Mukaber were subsequently tried and convicted for transporting the suicide bomber to the site of the attack. On June 30, 2002, during a commando raid in Nablus, Israeli soldiers killed Muhaned Taher, a senior Hamas bomb-maker whom Israel identified as responsible for this attack and others.

In the aftermath, the charred remains of the bus were shipped to the United States and put on display at the biannual Jewish Expo fair in New York, at the initiative of Zaka, an Israeli rescue and body-parts-recovery organization. Zaka's volunteers work at bombing scenes to recover fragments of blood and flesh for burial in accordance with Jewish law; the organization stated its purpose in displaying the bus was to increase public awareness of its work and to illustrate the effects of suicide bombings.

This dossier is based primarily on a Wikipedia summary of the attack. Two corroborating references — contemporaneous coverage from The New York Times and The Guardian — are cited by the underlying Wikipedia article but their specific text was not available for direct quotation in this dossier; they are included here as independent sources rather than as sources of additional facts.