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Hezbollah’s Pioneering Role in Suicide Terrorism
Aftermath of the bombing of the US Marine Corps Barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, October 1983. (Photo: Screenshot)
JNS.org – The Israel Defense Forces has recently reassessed its official explanation for a deadly explosion that rocked an administration building used by Israel in southern Lebanon in 1982. In doing so, it cast a spotlight on Hezbollah’s pioneering role in introducing suicide bombing to the Middle East.
A new investigation committee led by Maj.-Gen. (res.) Amir Abulafia, which included members of the Israel Security Agency and the Israel Police, determined “with high probability” that the collapse of the administration building in Tyre on Nov. 11, 1982, was due to a suicide car bombing.
The attack resulted in the deaths of 76 security personnel (from the Border Police, IDF and ISA) and 15 Lebanese detainees. Soon after the attack, Hezbollah claimed responsibility and commemorated it as the death of its “first martyr.”
Ely Karmon, a senior research scholar at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism at Reichman University in Herzliya, pointed out that this conclusion is not a new one.
“Most if not all experts on Hezbollah and suicide bombing considered early on that the bombing was the result of a suicide operation by Hezbollah,” Karmon told JNS.
He noted that a monument near Baalbek, Lebanon, is dedicated to 17-year-old Ahmad Qasir, the bomber responsible for the attack. Hezbollah celebrates the attack annually on November 11 as Martyr Day, with Nasrallah referring to it as the organization’s first.
Nearly a year after that attack, Karmon said, another suicide bombing occurred in Tyre, on Nov. 4, 1983. The bomber drove a pickup truck filled with explosives into an ISA building located at an IDF base, resulting in the deaths of 28 Israelis and 32 Lebanese prisoners, and wounding about 40 others.
These bombings firmly established Hezbollah as a pioneering force in suicide terrorism in the region.
However, Karmon added, the first modern suicide bombing in the Middle East is considered to have occurred on Dec. 15, 1981, in the form of an attack on the Iraqi embassy in Beirut by the Iraqi Shi’ite Islamist group al-Dawa.
The explosion leveled the embassy, killing 61 people and injuring at least 100 others. It was likely the first of five signature bombings organized by Imad Mughniyeh, a Hezbollah terrorist leader, in which a terrorist drive into a building with a bomb-laden truck, Karmon assessed. Mughniyeh was assassinated in a car bomb in Damascus, Syria, in 2008.
“The Lebanese branch of the Iraqi Dawa Party was founded in the 1960s. It would later become a core component in the establishment of the Hezbollah movement in 1982,” Karmon explained.
The use of suicide bombings by Hezbollah was significantly inspired by the tactics employed by Iranian forces during the Iran-Iraq War, according to Karmon.
“The sacrifice and martyrdom of Iranian young or child soldiers” likely influenced the young Hezbollah operatives, he stated. During the Iran-Iraq War, Iranian child soldiers were given plastic “keys to paradise” as symbolic assurances of their passage into heaven upon their deaths. These young soldiers were frequently used to clear minefields by simply walking through them, an act celebrated in Iran as a form of ultimate martyrdom.
Hezbollah’s introduction of suicide bombings set a precedent that was soon emulated by other, Palestinian Sunni terrorist organizations.
Karmon noted that after Israel deported 415 Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad operatives to Lebanon in December 1992, the deportees established a camp near the southern Lebanese village of Marj al-Zuhur, close to the Israeli border. During their stay in southern Lebanon, they were indoctrinated and trained in suicide bombing by Hezbollah operatives. After a year, they were permitted by Israel to travel back Gaza and Judea and Samaria, and began organizing the first suicide bombing atrocities of the 1990s.
The Mehola Junction bombing on April 16, 1993, in Samaria, marked the first suicide car-bombing carried out by Hamas and PIJ terrorists, said Karmon. This was followed by another car bombing by Hamas member Sulayman Zidan on Oct. 4, 1993 at Beit El.
Bassam Abu-Sharif, former PFLP spokesman, claims in his book Tried by Fire that Waddi Haddad, the operational leader of the terror organization at the time, initiated suicide bombings in the early 1970s. One recruit, Abu Harb, was trained to fly a twin-engine plane from the Bekaa Valley to Tel Aviv, with the intent of crashing it into the Shalom Tower. The plan was thwarted when Abu Harb crashed during a practice landing and was severely injured. Published in 1995, Sharif’s book predates the 9/11 attacks by six years.
The spread of suicide bombing tactics was not limited to the Middle East, Karmon told JNS.
In 1983, Sri Lankan Tamil Tiger cadres were training in Hezbollah terror camps at the time of the massive suicide truck bombing of the US Marines in Beirut.
“A few years later, the head of the Tamil Tigers, Prabhakaran, decided to try to model an attack after the Beirut suicide truck assassination,” said Karmon.
In July 1987, the first Tamil Tiger suicide attack occurred when a terrorist drove a truck into a barracks of Sinhalese Sri Lankan troops. This attack initiated a wave of suicide bombings that lasted for over two decades, demonstrating the wide-reaching influence of Hezbollah’s tactics.
“But they are not religious,” said Karmon in reference to the Tamil Tigers. “They’re not Islamic. They’re a Hindu group, a Marxist group. They’re actually anti-religious. They are building the concept of martyrdom around a secular idea of individuals essentially altruistically sacrificing for the good of the local community.” Nevertheless, the Tigers ended up killing a Sri Lankan president with a suicide bombing in 1993.
The Kurdish PKK separatists in Turkey also adopted suicide attacks. The group began using suicide attacks in mid-1996. Most PKK suicide attacks were carried out by women against military or police targets, and the campaign proved to be ineffective.
Meanwhile, Al-Qaeda began to adopt this tactic by the 1990s, and went on to plot and implement the deadliest suicide mass casualty terror attack in history, on Sept. 11, 2001. The hijacking of four passenger aircraft on that dark day occurred 30 years after the PFLP hijacked five passenger planes simultaneously and blew them up in Jordan.
In the years that followed 9/11, Al-Qaeda inspired jihadists would implement suicide terrorism in Iraq, Syria and around the Middle East, as well as in European cities. Islamic State, its successor organization, adopted the tactic as well, employing it in Afghanistan, the Middle East and Africa.
The post Hezbollah’s Pioneering Role in Suicide Terrorism first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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UN Data: Nearly 90 Percent of Gaza Aid ‘Intercepted’ Before Reaching Intended Recipients
Palestinians collect aid supplies from the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, June 9, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Hatem Khaled
The vast majority of humanitarian aid entering Gaza is intercepted before reaching its intended civilian recipients, newly released data from the United Nations shows, fueling growing concerns among Israeli officials and international observers about systemic aid diversion by armed groups in the enclave.
According to figures tracking humanitarian assistance for Gaza from May 19 to Aug. 1 of this year, out of the 2,010 UN trucks (carrying 27,434 tons of aid) collected from any of the crossings along Gaza’s perimeter, only 260 trucks (4,111 tons) reached their intended destination. That equates to a staggering 87 percent of all trucks and 85 percent of all tonnage of aid being stolen and not getting into the hands of civilians at the intended destination.
The UN’s own data, posted on the website of the UN Office for Project Services (UNOPS) as part of the “UN2720 Monitoring & Tracking Dashboard,” reveals that almost all the aid — 1,753 trucks (23,353 tons) — has been “intercepted, either peacefully by hungry people or forcefully by armed actors” while being transported inside Gaza over the past few months.
No breakdown is provided of how much aid has been seized by armed groups versus civilians.
The data also shows that much of the UN aid offloaded at any of the crossings along Gaza’s perimeter has not been collected to enter the war-torn enclave during this period. Out of 40,012 tons of aid (2,134 trucks) being delivered to the crossings, just 27,434 tons (2010 trucks) have been picked up. It’s unclear what exactly led to this discrepancy, with issues such as poor internal coordination and security concerns potentially delaying aid shipments.
The UN2720 mechanism, created earlier this year, was intended to boost transparency by verifying and tracking aid shipments via QR codes at key checkpoints. The system monitors each pallet from offloading to delivery and flags any discrepancies in a centralized database.
Israel has facilitated the entry of thousands of aid trucks into Gaza, with Israeli officials condemning the UN and other international aid agencies for their alleged failure to distribute supplies, noting much of the humanitarian assistance has been stalled at border crossings or stolen by the ruling Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.
On Sunday, Israel announced a halt in military operations for 10 hours a day in parts of Gaza and new aid corridors as Arab and European countries began airdropping supplies into the enclave.
However, the UN and several Western governments have increased pressure on Israel to allow more aid into Gaza, blaming the Jewish state for what they described as a hunger crisis and insufficient amounts of aid reaching civilians.
Israeli officials have said that claims of mass starvation in Gaza are false and being amplified by not only Hamas, which has ruled Gaza for nearly two decades, but also international humanitarian organizations and media organizations to manipulate global opinion.
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Dutch Nurse Under Police Investigation for Alleged Threats Against Israeli Patients
Pro-Hamas demonstrators march in the Dutch city of Nijmegen. Photo: Reuters/Romy Arroyo Fernandez
A Muslim nurse in the Netherlands is under police investigation after allegedly threatening to administer lethal injections to Israeli patients — an incident that has sparked public outrage and intensified fears over rising antisemitism and patient safety in Europe’s health-care systems.
The comments were widely circulated by Israeli influencer Max Veifer, who also exposed a recent case in Australia where two nurses were suspended for two years over antisemitic threats and remarks.
In a video shared on social media, Veifer denounced Dutch-Muslim nurse Batisma Chayat Sa’id’s remarks as a serious violation of medical ethics.
“Someone like that should be prosecuted and barred from treating patients. Imagine your grandparents being cared for by someone so hateful,” the Israeli influencer said.
Zorgwekkende dreiging op Instagram: Nederlandse verpleegkundige is bereid om “zionisten een extra spuitje te geven” en bereid “zionisten te laten sterven binnen de gezondheidszorg.” pic.twitter.com/xTnXNi1wH5
— CIDI
(@CIDI_nieuws) July 29, 2025
The incident was sparked when an Israeli-Dutch woman living in the Netherlands commented on a social media post by far-right politician Geert Wilders, who cautioned about what he called the country’s looming radical Islamization by 2050.
A social media account belonging to the Muslim nurse also commented on the post, claiming it would happen by 2027, to which the Israeli woman responded, “Your dream is our nightmare. But people wake up from nightmares. Our Netherlands, our Israel.”
“Nothing belongs to you! My grandparents built the Netherlands. I was born and raised here, and I will do everything in my power to help this country get rid of the Zionist cancer,” the nurse further replied.
“You know what I’m doing with Zionists — giving an extra injection as a nurse specialist. Letting them go to heaven!” Sa’id continued.
When the Israeli woman threatened to report her, Sa’id replied: “Haha, try your best! I don’t have a boss — I’m the boss! All Zionists can die, inside healthcare and beyond, and I’m happy to help with that!”
Shortly after her posts gained widespread attention, Sa’id deleted all her social media accounts, insisting that her identity had been stolen and that she was not responsible for such comments.
On Wednesday, local police detained Sa’id for questioning, but she denied the allegations, asserting that someone had impersonated her online.
“It seems someone is pretending to be me, posting false and defamatory statements,” the nurse said. “I want to make it clear — I hold no hatred toward Jews or any people, race, religion, or identity.”
Even after announcing plans to file an identity theft complaint, she faces skepticism from authorities, who have assigned a digital forensics expert to scrutinize her online accounts.
Last year, an account under her name also posted threatening messages aimed at Jewish people, including “Your time will come — don’t spare anyone,” and another in which she described the burial of Israelis in Gaza as “a dream come true.”
Earlier this year, two Australian nurses — Ahmad Rashad Nadir and Sarah Abu Lebdeh — gained international attention after they were seen in an online video posing as doctors and making inflammatory statements during a night-shift conversation with Veifer.
The widely circulated footage, which sparked international outrage and condemnation, showed Abu Lebdeh declaring she would refuse to treat Israeli patients and instead kill them, while Nadir made a throat-slitting gesture and claimed he had already killed many.
Following the incident, New South Wales authorities in Australia suspended their nursing registrations and banned them from working as nurses nationwide.
They were also charged with federal offenses, including threatening violence against a group and using a carriage service to threaten, menace, and harass. If convicted, they face up to 22 years in prison.
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French Authorities Halt Gaza Evacuations After Palestinian Student Expelled Over Viral Antisemitic Posts
Anti-Israel demonstration supporting the BDS movement, Paris France, June 8, 2024. Photo: Claire Serie / Hans Lucas via Reuters Connect
French authorities have halted evacuations from Gaza after a Palestinian student was expelled from the prestigious Sciences Po Lille and placed under investigation, following the viral circulation of hundreds of antisemitic posts praising Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and calling for the murder of Jews.
The incident drew widespread condemnation and public outrage, prompting French ministers to demand answers and call for an investigation into how the Gazan student was allowed into the country in the first place.
On Friday, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot announced that all further evacuations from Gaza would be suspended pending the completion of the investigation into the student’s background.
After receiving a scholarship, 25-year-old Nour Atalla, a Palestinian from Gaza, arrived in the country in early July to begin her master’s degree in law and communications this fall at the Institute of Political Science in Lille, northern France.
Barrot confirmed that discussions are ongoing about the student’s possible return to Gaza, making clear that she must leave the country pending the investigation’s outcome.
“She has no place at Sciences Po, nor in France,” the top French diplomat said.
On Thursday, local authorities reported that a criminal investigation is underway into Atalla, with the public prosecutor in Lille confirming the case was opened for “apology of terrorism, apology of crimes against humanity using an online public communication service.”
Barrot admitted lapses in the screening process that allowed her entry and has mandated a comprehensive review of everyone evacuated from Gaza to France.
“The security checks, carried out by the French services and Israeli authorities, did not detect the antisemitic content,” the French diplomat said.
Atalla is one of 292 Gazans admitted to the country following a court ruling that opened the door for Gazans to seek refugee status based on their nationality.
She was offered a place at Sciences Po Lille University based on “academic excellence” and following a recommendation by the French consulate in Jerusalem.
On Wednesday, the university announced it had revoked Atalla’s enrollment after hundreds of her past antisemitic and violent social media posts went viral, sparking widespread condemnation from political leaders and members of the local Jewish community.
In several of these posts, she glorified Hitler, praised Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, called for the execution of Israeli hostages and the killing of Jews, and expressed support for terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah.
In one post, Atalla shared a video of Hitler giving a speech about Jews, writing, “Kill their young and their old. Show them no mercy … And kill them everywhere.”
In another post shared on Oct. 7, 2023, the day of the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, she wrote, “We must do everything we can to match the bloodshed — as much as possible.”