The Palestinian Islamic Jihad

On Saturday, October 2, 2003, two days before Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar), a female suicide bomber who belonged to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad blew herself up inside Maxim, a popular neighborhood restaurant in Haifa, owned and run by both a Jewish and an Arab family. In the explosion 21 of the diners, Jews and Arabs alike, were killed (including 6 members representing 3 generations of a family from Kibbutz Yagur, near Haifa) and 60 were wounded. In an announcement broadcast the same day, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the terrorist bombing.

The Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) is a relatively small, radical Islamic-oriented terrorist organization¹ whose ideology is a combination of religious Islamic fanaticism and extremist nationalism. It views terrorist attacks against Israel as the only means for achieving its goals, the first of which are the destruction of the State of Israel and the establishment of a religious Islamic Palestinian state on the area they refer to as “Filisteen” (by which they mean the Land of Israel). During the current hostilities the PIJ carried out a series of murderous suicide bombing attacks, culminating in the one at Maxim.

¹ The PIJ calls itself a “movement.” However, as opposed to Hamas, it does not enjoy much support from the Palestinian population and is essentially an organization rather than a widely-based popular movement.

Both the United States and the European Union have classified the PIJ as a terrorist organization. However, as a rule, the Palestinian Authority (PA) has avoided confrontations with the PIJ and Hamas, thus allowing both of these extremist Islamic movements, which view themselves as the eventual replacement of the PA, to become stronger and to consolidate their positions among their potential supporters.

The PIJ is almost totally dependent upon non-Palestinian backup: Syria permits its headquarters (based in Damascus and run by Dr. Ramadan Shalah) to operate both on its territory and in Lebanon, and from there to direct its terrorist activity in the PA-administered territories. Iran, the organization’s primary sponsor, gives the PIJ financial aid, in fact providing almost all its budget, and uses it as a means of escalating Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israel which originate in the PA-administered territories while erasing Iranian “finger prints.”

Milestones in PIJ history and examples of its ideology

Palestinian religious Islamic fanaticism, whose most prominent representatives are the PIJ and Hamas, is an integral part of the worldwide trend toward a religious Islamic resurgence which has been developing in the Middle East since the early nineteen seventies and one of whose crowning achievements was the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979. The resurgence’s standard bearers are militant Islamic groups composed mainly of young, educated individuals whose frustration with and alienation from the social, cultural and political life in the Middle East (and worldwide wherever Moslems are found) motivated them to adopt religious Islamic fanaticism. That was done as part of their protest and struggle for change, aimed at solving the identity crisis born of the clash between traditional Islamic values and the secular, modern Western culture to which they were exposed and which they found confusing. However, while initially the religious Islamic fanatics in the Arab countries distanced themselves from the armed conflict with Israel, thus postponing it to an indefinite time in the future, the religious Islamic radicalism which developed in what are now the PA-administered territories stressed the need for an immediate armed Jihad to “liberate Palestine” and eradicate the “Zionist entity.²” That point was one of the main controversies between the PIJ and the Moslem Brotherhood during the PIJ’s early stages. ³

² Meir Hatina, Palestinian Radicals: The Islamic Jihad Movement, Tel Aviv University/The Moshe Dayan Center, 1994, pp. 9-12.
³ According to a study of the PIJ found in the possession of the PA Internal Security Forces in Bethlehem during Operation Defensive Shield. Henceforth: PIJ study.

The Palestinian Islamic Jihad began with a small group of Palestinian students studying at Zagazig University (in the north of Egypt) during the nineteen seventies. The university was a stronghold of religious Islamic fundamentalism and the group was headed by Fat’hi Abd al-Aziz al-Shkaki (henceforth Dr. Fat’hi Shkaki), who was studying medicine. Dr. Ramadan Shalah, the PIJ’s current secretary, was also one of the organization’s founders. The founding members had originally belonged to the Moslem Brotherhood but were frustrated by its lack of real action. They wanted to copy the Jihad movements which were flourishing in Egypt at that time and create a Palestinian Islamic organization which would combine radical Islamis activism with uncompromising Palestinian nationalism as an alternative to the secular nationalism of the Fatah, the main faction of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO).

The radical Islamic organizations in the PA-administered territories use terror (which they describe as an armed Jihad) to attain their ends. They reached ideological and organizational maturity at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the1980s, when Shkaki and his comrades returned to the Gaza Strip. They began to formulate the revolutionary ideas they had absorbed while in Egypt and to accommodate them to the Palestinian arena, at the same time separating themselves from the ideology and organizational framework of the Moslem Brotherhood. The Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979 was an important factor in shaping the revolutionary trend in the form of an organization during 1980-1981. It was at that time that the Gazan branch of the Islamic Jihad appeared, although it had other names, the most well-known of which was the Islamic Vanguard. It had two founders: Dr. Fat’hi Shkaki and Sheikh Abd al-Aziz ‘Odeh, a religious Islamic preacher from the refugee camp at Jebalya in the Gaza Strip, the scion of a Palestinian family which had fled from the area around Beersheba in 1948.

After Dr. Fat’hi Shkaki and his comrades returned to what were then the “occupied territories,” i.e., the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the founding members exploited political and educational activities to set up a secret infrastructure of activists, at the same time establishing armed terrorists cells. The universities and mosques in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip served as two important sources of potential supporters for the organization in its early stages.

According to an internal PIJ study, the organization formulated an ideology which sought the immediate “liberation” of all Palestine through an armed Jihad which would be directed against “Jewish existence in Palestine” and would lead to the extinction of “the Zionist entity.” The Jihad, according to the PIJ, was an immediate obligation that had to be fulfilled and not postponed until after the establishment of a religious “Islamic state.” According to the organization’s ideology, armed struggle was the first and necessary step in the process of rehabilitating the entire nation of Islam through the return to the original religious Islamic values.⁴ The PIJ, inspired by Dr. Fat’hi Shkaki, expressed its enthusiastic support for Ayatollah Khomeini and the Islamic Revolution in Iran, and the organization’s pro-Iranian orientation became its trademark. During that time there was an open breach between the PIJ and the Moslem Brotherhood because the Brotherhood opposed the PIJ’s support for the Iranian revolution and viewed it as a “deviation from the true path.”

⁴ From an Arabic study entitled The Palestinian Islamic Jihad Movement, Its Growth and Methods, 2001, pp. 7, 14, captured during Operation Defensive Shield (one of many items published by the PIJ Movement;. Henceforth: PIJ study). It is most probably an internal PIJ document, and well researched and written according to academic standards.

The PIJ study found in the possession of the PA Internal Security Forces in Bethlehem notes that the organization participated in creating the psychological atmosphere which led to the outbreak of the first intifada, which began in December, 1987, and that its members were among the first to take part in it. According to the study, the PIJ was working to escalate the confrontation with Israel and to turn the intifada into an armed conflict. According to the study, the expulsion of Dr. Fat’hi Shkaki by Israel to Lebanon in 1988 led to the a new stage in the organization’s history because it enabled its members to secure closer relations with “the main supporting countries of the Arabic and Islamic world” [that is, with Syria and Iran]. At the time, continues the study, the organization also strengthened its ties with Hezbollah in Lebanon.

According to the study, after the Oslo Accords were signed in September, 1993, “when the flames of the [first] intifada began to die down,” the organization initiated a series of military actions against Israel while adopting a plan of “military suicide attacks” (‘amaliyyat ‘askariyyah istish’hadiyyah) to sabotage the nascent Oslo process. The most important action at that time, says the study, was the suicide bombing attack at Beit Lid, near Netanya, a city in the central part of Israel, in which two PIJ “fighters” blew themselves up at a crowded bus stop, killing 22 Israeli soldiers (January 22, 1995).

The PIJ’s study notes that on October 26, 1995, Dr. Fat’hi Shkaki, then the leader of the organization, was killed in Malta by “Mossad agents” while he was on his way from Libya to his permanent residence in Damascus. His appointed successor was Dr. Ramadan Shalah who was, as previously noted (Section 6, above), one of the organization’s founding members. The first military action of the second intifada, states the study, was carried out near the Mahane Yehuda market in the heart of Jerusalem [On November 11, 2000, a car bomb exploded in the Mahane Yehuda market, killing two individuals. It was the first PIJ action carried out within Israeli borders during the current conflict.] According to the study, the PIJ has carried out a long series of suicide bombings as well as “ordinary military attacks” against Israel in order to bring about military escalation leading to the collapse of the peace process. ⁵

⁵ PIJ study, pp. 12-13.

Description of the PIJ’s operational activity

Since the current conflict began in the PA-administered territories (late September, 2000), the PIJ has carried out more than 442 terrorist attacks (as opposed to the more than 500 carried out by Hamas, which leads the field in attacking Israel). In those actions (including suicide bombing attacks – see below) 134 Israelis have been killed and 880 wounded, the overwhelming majority of them innocent civilians.

The organization has carried out a long series of suicide bombing attacks against Israel using both male and female terrorists, the last of which was at Maxim, a restaurant in Haifa, in which 21 were killed and 60 wounded, as noted. Conspicuous among the targets the PIJ chooses are public transportation (usually buses) and places of business and entertainment (restaurants, malls and coffee houses) which are crowded with civilians.

Among the organization’s more prominent suicide bombing attacks the following are worth mentioning:

	Jerusalem, November 2, 2000: a car bomb exploded in the Mahane Yehuda market, killing 2.
	Hadera (a city to the south of Haifa), May 25, 2001: two terrorists carrying explosives blew themselves up in a car next to a bus, wounding 66.
	Binyamina (south of Haifa), July 16, 2001: a suicide bombing attack was carried out at a bus stop near the train station, killing 2 and wounding 10.
	Kiriyat Motzkin (a city bordering Haifa), August 12, 2001: a suicide bombing attack was carried out at the Wall Street Restaurant, wounding 16.
	Beit Lid (near Netanya), September 9, 2001: a car bomb exploded, wounding 11.
	Hadera, October 28, 2001: two terrorists rode through the center of the city shooting at passersby, killing 4 and wounding 42.
	On a road near the entrance to an army base situated to the east of Hadera, November 29, 2001: a suicide bombing attack was carried out on a bus, killing 3 and wounding 9.
	Jerusalem, at the entrance to the Mamilla Hilton, December 5, 2001: an armed attack was carried out which left 11 wounded.
	A main intersection near Haifa, December 9, 2001: an attempted suicide bombing attack was carried out, leaving 24 wounded.
	The old central bus station in Tel Aviv, January 25, 2002: a double suicide bombing attack was carried out in which the PIJ and Fatah collaborated, wounding 23.
	Afula (a city to the south of Haifa), March 5, 2002: a suicide bombing attack was carried out, killing 1 and wounding 15.
	On a road through Wadi Ara (a valley to the east of Hadera, populated almost entirely by Israeli Arabs), March 20, 2002: a suicide bombing attack was carried out on a bus, killing 7 and wounding 30.
	The main intersection near Kibbutz Yagur, near Haifa, April 10, 2002: a suicide bombing attack was carried out on a bus, killing 8 and wounding 15.
	The Megiddo junction west of Afula, June 5, 2002: a car bomb driven by a terrorist who positioned himself close to the bus’ gas tank exploded, killing 17 and wounding 50.
	The Umm el-Fahem intersection in Wadi Ara, September 18, 2002: a suicide bombing attack was carried out against Israeli police, killing 1 and wounding 2.
	The Karkur intersection in the Wadi Ara area, October 21, 2002: a car bomb driven by two terrorists exploded next to a bus, killing 14 and wounding 50.
	“The synagogue goers,” a site in Hebron, November 15, 2002: an ambush carried out by three terrorists, killing 12 and wounding 16, including a high-ranking Israeli army officer.
	Netanya, March 30, 2003: a suicide bombing attack was carried out at the London Caf?, wounding 54.
	Afula, May 19, 2003: a female suicide bomber blew herself up at the entrance to the mall, killing 3 and wounding 54.
	Kefar Yavetz, a village in the central part Israel, July 7, 2003: a terrorist forced his way into a house and blew himself up, killing 1 and wounding 6.
	Haifa, the Maxim restaurant, October 4, 2003: a female suicide bomber blew herself up inside the restaurant, killing 21 and wounding 60.

Support for the PIJ suicide bombing attack at Maxim among the Palestinian population

Despite PA Chairman Yasser Arafat’s initial denunciation of the suicide bombing attack at Maxim, the Palestinian and Arab media expressed support and justification for it. For instance:

	On October 10, 2003, Palestinian television (controlled by Arafat) broadcast a sermon given by Sheikh Ibrahim Madiras (identified with Hamas) explaining the female suicide bomber’s motives for the attack against Israelis and justifying it.
	On the same day, Arabic television news network, al-Jezeera, based in Katar, broadcast an interview with Samir Mashharawi, a member of the Fatah high committee, who spoke about the suicide attack on the Haifa restaurant in positive terms.
	On October 16, 2003, the newspaper al-Kuds (published in East Jerusalem), printed, after a 10-day delay, 2 death notices for the suicide bomber. One was inserted by her family and the other by the Islamic Jama’ah (the PIJ student society) and the Mosque Youth group of Jenin.
	In the upcoming elections for the student council at the Islamic University in Gaza City, a list of candidates is expected to be submitted by the Islamic Jama’ah bearing the name of Jirdath, the female lawyer who committed the suicide bombing inside the Maxim restaurant .

It should be noted that in a survey conducted by Dr. Khalil Shkaki⁶ (between October 7-14, 2003), 75% of those interviewed expressed their support for the suicide bombing attack on the restaurant.

Hannadi Taysir Abd al-Malik Jirdath, the female suicide bomber who blew herself up inside the Maxim restaurant in Haifa.
“With the strength and courage of Allah, I decided to become the sixth female martyr [i.e., suicide bomber] who agreed to blow up her body into pieces that would hit the heart of every Zionist colonist in my country...” (al-Arabiyyah Television, October 5, 2003)

⁶ Dr. Khalil Shakaki is the brother of Dr. Fathi Shakaki. He used to hold radical views but became a scholar well-known for his support of Palestinian-Israeli coexistence. He founded the most important Palestinian institute conducting public surveys on a variety of topics.

The PIJ’s terrorist infrastructure in Jenin

The PIJ has operational infrastructures in the large cities of the PA-territories. The most prominent ones are to be found in Samaria, particularly in Jenin (known as “the martyrs’ [suicide bombers’] capital”). An examination of the locations of PIJ suicide bombing attacks against Israel indicates a substantial increase in the north and in the region around Wadi Ara; the attacks were perpetrated by terrorists who came from the area around Jenin.

During the recent temporary cessation of hostilities (hudna), the PIJ exploited the interval to perform massive repairs to its operational infrastructure in Samaria. At the same time, its operatives in Jenin and Samaria worked overtime to carry out terrorist attacks (most of them frustrated by the Israeli security forces), disregarding the hudna completely.

Despite the success of the Israeli security forces in thwarting most of the PIJ’s terrorist activity, and the arrests of its operatives notwithstanding, the operational infrastructure in Jenin nevertheless managed to carry out two suicide bombing attacks in recent months. One occurred on July 7, 2003, during the hudna, when a suicide bomber blew himself up in the living room of a house in Kefar Yavetz, a moshav in the central part of Israel, resulting in the death of an Israeli woman. The second was the attack by Hannadi Jirdath inside the Maxim restaurant in Haifa; she came from a family in Jenin and was not its only PIJ terrorist member.

The PIJ infrastructure in Hebron

Another recently-exposed hotbed of PIJ terrorist organization is Hebron. During the hudna, PIJ terrorists there devoted their time to preparing lethal attacks against Israel. The infrastructure’s head was Muhammad Ayyub Muhammad Sidr, who was killed in a exchange of fire with Israeli forces (August 14, 2003) while hiding in a carpentry shop which served as a laboratory for preparing explosive devices. Many other prominent PIJ infrastructure members, which has been in operation since the beginning of the current intifada, were recently killed, among them Diyab Shwiki, Sidr’s right-hand man.

Muhammad Sidr was responsible for the death of 19 Israelis, the wounding of 80, the killing of two UN observers and the wounding of one. During the interrogations of arrested PIJ members, it was learned that Muhammad Sidr was in constant communication with PIJ headquarters in Damascus and that before his death he was involved with the planning of bombing and suicide bombing attacks against Israel, including the recruiting, arming and training of suicide squads. The laboratory in which he was killed prepared powerful explosive devices to upgrade the lethal capacities of the bombs used by PIJ members in their attacks against Israel.

Lebanon as one of the PIJ’s operational backup countries

The PIJ has run an operational infrastructure in Lebanon ever since Dr. Fat’hi Shkaki, the organization’s founder, was expelled there from Israeli territory. The organization is allowed to exploit the infrastructure as part of Iranian policy in support of terrorism in close cooperation with Hezbollah and with Syria’s approval, without which it could not operate on Lebanese soil.

Since Dr. Fat’hi Shkaki was expelled to Lebanon in 1988, the organization has carried out 20 terrorist attacks against Israeli soldiers in Lebanon, all of them in cooperation with Hezbollah. In 1999, however, the organization discarded Lebanon as its main launching site for attacks against Israel. It now focuses on promoting operational activities “inside” [the PA-administrated territories and Israel], and in Israel’s assessment the resources previously allocated to Lebanon have been diverted to it, evidence for which is the aid given by Hezbollah to the training in Lebanon of PIJ operatives from the PA-administered territories. It should be noted that the operatives who carried out the terrorist attack against Kibbutz Matzuba, close to the Lebanese border, on March 12, 2002, which resulted in the death of 6 Israelis, were PIJ members working for Hezbollah who had infiltrated the Israeli-Lebanese border into Israel.

The funeral of PIJ operatives killed in southern Lebanon by IDF forces, November, 1996

Muhammad Ayyub Muhammad Sidr

25 years old, born in Hebron, head of the PIJ in that city. He began his terrorist activities against Israel in 1999 as head of the Islamic Jama’ah (the PIJ student society) at the Polytechnic University of Hebron.⁷ At the end of that year he was arrested for his involvement in military actions. After his release from jail in June, 2000, he began constructing the PIJ infrastructure in the Hebron area, which was responsible for carrying out several lethal terrorist attacks against Israel (in which, as previously noted, Israel soldiers and citizens and UN personnel were killed and wounded).

⁷ Like Hamas, the PIJ uses the Islamic Jama’ah to express the importance it gives to student activity in the universities in the PA-administered territories. The Hamas and PIJ student societies imbue the student population with a culture of justifying the inflicting of fatal casualties and carrying out suicide bombings against Israeli through enlisting students for the execution of such terrorist activities.

Syrian aid for the PIJ

During the current intifada, which began in late September, 2000, Iran and Syria have relentlessly worked to prevent a relaxation of hostilities originating in the PA-administered territories and to increase terrorist activity against Israel. Fearing Israeli reprisals and international condemnation, they do not act directly but rather through the use of “emissaries,” i.e., the Palestinian organizations operating under their aegis, principally the PIJ, Hamas and Ahmad Jabril’s Palestinian Front. Syria permits those organizations (which collaborate with one another) to maintain their military, political and propaganda infrastructures on its territory and in Lebanon.

The aforementioned infrastructures include headquarters, offices, military equipment and supplies and training camps, such as Jabril’s Palestinian Front’s base at Ein Sahib, which was attacked by the Israeli Air Force on October 5, 2003. Syria’s claim that the Palestinian organizations keep only “information offices” on its territory is therefore a complete fabrication.

The organization headquarters (under Syrian and Lebanese aegis and instructed by Damascus) direct the terrorists in the PA-administered territories in their attacks against Israel. That direction includes: the coordination necessary to carry out a terrorist attack; suggesting operational ideas and initiating activities by means of operatives first invited to Syria; directions for escalating lethal suicide attacks; or, when it serves Syrian and Iranian interests, instructions for a temporary lessening of terrorist activities.

Dr. Ramadan Abdallah Muhammad Shalah, the PIJ leader, often visits Syria and operates under the protection of the Syrian regime. From his headquarters in Damascus he and his aides maintain constant contact with PIJ operatives in the PA-administered territories and direct their activities.

PIJ headquarters is in constant contact with terrorist operatives in the PA-administered territories, a fact attested to by arrested PIJ members interrogated by Israeli security forces. Thus, for instance, Ali al-Sa’di (known as “al-Saffuri”) and Thabet Mardawi, two senior terrorists from the Jenin region arrested during Operation Defensive Shield, admitted under interrogation that they regularly communicated with Dr. Ramadan Shalah and his aides, members of PIJ headquarters. They both stated that they were frequently communicated with PIJ headquarters in Damascus to discuss a number of issues, such as:

	Clarifying the political positions taken by the organization’s leadership in Damascus (regarding its policy of carrying out terrorist attacks against Israel).
	Informing headquarters of their responsibility for terrorist attacks carried out by members of the organization (reports from the PA-administered territories are the basis for the public announcements made in Damascus).
	Requests for money.
	Undergoing relevant training needed for the preparation of weapons and explosive devices.

Iranian aid for the PIJ

“The Palestinian Islamic Jihad is one of the many fruits on our leader Khomeini’s tree” (Dr. Ramadan Shalah, IRNA [Iranian Republic News Agency], May 22, 2002).

“The Iranian Islamic Revolutionin 1979 is a victory for the model the PIJ has been striving to attain since the middle of the 1970s…” (PIJ study, p. 19).

Of all the Palestinian terrorist organizations, the PIJ is the one with the closest ties to Iran and receives more Iranian aid, especially financial, than any other. For Iran (and for other countries which support international terror, money is one of the most important tools for operating terrorist infrastructures, in this case in the PA-administered territories as well as for encouraging the activities of various Palestinian terrorist organizations. According both to captured PA documents and the statements of terrorists arrested and interrogated, the terrorist organizations operating under Iranian aegis, that is, the PIJ, Hamas and Hezbollah, regularly receive large sums of money from Iran.

With that it mind, it should be noted that Iran is practically the PIJ’s only source of funding. The organization’s annual budget has been estimated at several million dollars, a large percentage of which is earmarked for funding terrorist attacks carried out by its operatives against Israel and maintaining its “terrorist aparatus:” offices, salaries, weapons and explosives, as well as financial aid to the families of casualties and detainees. In July, 2003, the Palestinian security forces claimed that they had confiscated $3 million in cash which Iran had transferred to the PIJ (a considerable sum of money even according to the PIJ’s criteria).

In the assessment of the Israeli security forces, only an extremely small amount of the organization’s budget is allotted to funding its civilian infrastructure (much smaller than the amounts allotted by Hamas for the same purpose). The PIJ’s civilian infrastructure includes a number of societies in the West Bank (al-Ihsan, al-Naqa’ for women and the Islamic youth club in Bethlehem) and in the Gaza Strip (7 branches of al-Ihsan). The societies operate in the fields of health, welfare and religious Islamic education.

All of the above provide a clear illustration of how, by means of a relatively “insignificant” investment, Iran bought itself power over a small, “quality” albeit terrorist organization and takes advantage of it to influence its terrorist members to continue their attacks against Israel inside and outside of the PA-administered territories. The organization’s suicide bombing attacks are therefore a clear indication of the political success of Iranian support of terror, all of it done without leaving any clear Iranian “fingerprints.”

Dr. Ramadan Shalah – his portrait as the current leader of the PIJ

Ramadan Abdallah Muhammad Shalah was born in 1958 in the Saja’iyyah neighborhood of the Gaza Strip, one of many siblings. As a high school student he joined the Moslem Brotherhood, which also funded his tuition at Zagazig University in Egypt, considered a stronghold of rising religious Islamic fundamentalism during the nineteen seventies. When he was a student (between 1977 and 1981), he met a group of other Palestinian students from the Gaza Strip, including Fat’hi Shkaki, who wanted to imitate the militant Jihad movements which were flourishing in Egypt at that time. Ramadan Shalah became one of the founders of the PIJ and edited its internal political journal.

When he returned to the Gaza Strip on 1981 he was hired as a lecturer in the Economics Department of Gaza’s Islamic University and became a sought-after speaker. In 1985 he continued his studies in England and was awarded a PhD in economics from Durham University. He then moved to the United States and lectured in international relations at Tampa University in Florida. He was chosen as the PIJ’s secretary general in late 1995 after Dr. Shkaki died in Malta.

Dr. Ramadan Abdallah Muhammad Shalah in a telephone interview given to al-Jezeera on March 30, 2003. During the interview he claimed PIJ responsibility for the suicide bombing attack carried out by Rami Jamil Ghanem of the PIJ Jerusalem Squads [the PIJ’s operational wing] at the London Caf? in Netanya, March 30, 2003, in which 30 Israelis were injured. The PIJ announcement linked the suicide bombing attack, which took place during the American military engagement in Iraq, to that carried out at Najaf against the American army currently stationed there (October, 2003). That should not come as a surprise, as the PIJ represents an ideology also hostile to the United States and the values it stands for.