A Palestinian suicide bombing was carried out in Jerusalem, Israel on Egged bus #19, on 29 January 2004. A Palestinian bomber detonated an explosive belt as the bus was traveling between the two campuses of Hadassah Medical Center, when the bus was at the corner of Arlozorov street and Gaza Street. Eleven passengers were killed and over 50 people were wounded, 13 of them seriously. Both Hamas and Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades claimed responsibility. The site was chosen to be near the Israeli Prime Minister's residence. It was the most fatal attack in Israel since the Maxim restaurant suicide bombing, and among the top 20 most deadly attacks of the Second Intifada.
ZAKA, a voluntary post-disaster response team in Israel, alongside a Christian Zionist group called Jerusalem Connection International, brought the bombed out shell of Bus 19 to The Hague in 2004 during a hearing in the International Criminal Court on the West Bank barrier. They wanted to illustrate the human impact of terrorism felt in Israel. Rabbi Avi Weiss attended the display of the bus at The Hague, and said it was an effective emotive piece to connotate the reality of terror. While the bus was displayed at The Hague, Arab leaders including Balad party Arab Knesset member Azmi Bishara, Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei, and Palestinian National Initiative director Mustafa Barghouti agreed that the timing of the suicide bombing hurt their people's cause.
After its display at The Hague, the Bus 19 exhibit was seen as successful by Jewish synagogues and university groups in the United States, and ZAKA received requests for it in the U.S. The bus went on a tour in the country, with memorials held at the National Mall near the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C. for the National Day of Prayer in the U.S.; it was subsequently shown at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, San Francisco and Berkeley, California, and at several other cities. The bus was later transported to Adamstown, Maryland, to be incorporated into a Peace Memorial at Camp Shoresh affiliated with Beth Sholom Congregation. The Bus 19 suicide bombing was featured in an exhibition by Dutch curator Nadette de Visser called Objects in Conflict: Israeli and Palestinian Stories. Her exhibition included a damaged jacket in the attack worn by an injured journalist Erik Schechter from The Jerusalem Post, and was shown in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and at the Arti et Amicitiae in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Author Zeruya Shalev based her autobiographical novel Pain on her experiences surviving injuries from the bombing; her book won the 2019 Jan Michalski Prize for literature.
Multiple lawsuits were filed by families of victims of the bombing against financial banking institutions under the U.S. Anti-Terrorism Act of 1992 (ATA), including Linde v. Arab Bank in 2004 and Goldberg v. UBS AG in 2008. The United States House of Representatives discussed the Goldberg impact, in a 2025 amicus curiae brief in the Fuld v. Palestine Liberation Organization case before the Supreme Court of the United States. A separate lawsuit, Sokolow v. Palestine Liberation Organization, triggered the treble damages portion of the Anti-Terrorism Act, and families of Bus 19 casualties and other victims of terror from the Second Intifada period garnered an award judgement of US$655.5 million. The defendants attempted to freeze the payout in a request to the US Supreme Court — this was denied by Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in August 2026.
Attack
On 29 January 2004, shortly before 9:00 AM, a Palestinian suicide bomber detonated himself in the back of an Egged bus at the corner of Arlozorov street and Gaza street in Jerusalem. The attack took place near the official residence of then-Prime Minister of Israel, Ariel Sharon. The explosion itself occurred as the bus was approaching Sharon's residence. Sharon was not present in his residence at the time the bomb went off on the bus.
The bus had been crowded and nearly full, due to the attack taking place during local rush hour during residents' commutes. The blast tore the bus apart, blowing the roof into the air and breaking all the windows. Bus 19's former color was originally green; it had become charred by the explosion. One side of the bus had been exploded off and separated from its structure. A sanitation employee who had witnessed the bombing at the site stated he had seen parts of bodies fly into the air and up to dozens of meters away from the scene.
One of the first journalists to arrive on scene prior to the ambulances was Bret Stephens, who was at the time editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post. He arrived three minutes after hearing the initial blast from his residence. Stephens recounted seeing "chunks of human flesh" on the ground, a disembodied arm and a leg, and pools of blood. He observed a disembodied torso, three corpses outside of the bus, and three unmoving bodies inside of the bus, in addition to an individual who was rocking with convulsions. He told The Guardian on scene, "There was glass everywhere, human remains everywhere, shoes, feet, pieces of guts. There were pieces of body everywhere."
Paramedic Eli Beer stated the impact zone and disbursement covered a large radius: "There were a lot of heavy injuries, a lot of the people who were injured were in bad condition, a lot of people had missing limbs." Injured patients from the bombing were taken to hospitals in Israel including the Ein Karem and Mount Scopus hospitals within the Hadassah Medical Center, Shaare Zedek Medical Center, and Bikur Cholim Hospital. Body parts were collected from the bomb blast scene and transported to Abu Kabir Forensic Institute in Tel Aviv for forensic identification and criminal investigation analysis. Originally the death count was ten individuals deceased from the bombing shortly after the explosion. After further analysis of the body parts at the Abu Kabir laboratory, law enforcement raised the total to eleven deceased.
Casualties
Fatalities
The blast killed 11 people and injured more than 50. Thirteen were in serious condition. The Bus 19 bombing was the most fatal terror attack at the time since the Maxim restaurant suicide bombing in 2003. Prior to the explosion, the city of Jerusalem had not been hit with a similar terrorist attack since the 2003 Café Hillel bombing. The Café Moment bombing from March 2002 which also resulted in 11 fatalities, occurred in the same vicinity. The bus 19 bombing was among the top 20 most fatal terror attacks during the Second Intifada.
Terror victims murdered in the bombing included: Eli Zfira, Mehbere Kifile, Dana Itach, Baruch (Roman) Hondiashvili, Yechezkel Isser Goldberg, Natalia Gamril, Viorel Octavian Florescu, Anat Darom, Hava Hannah (Anya) Bonder, Rose Boneh, and Avraham (Albert) Balhasan. Anat Darom was a 23-year-old student who was on the bus on her way to a job interview. Darom was in the midst of her studies in the fields of statistics and sociology. Rose Boneh was thirty-nine and worked in a laboratory alongside her sister. Eli Tzfira worked in janitorial services in education and was on his way to the start of his shift.
Baruch (Roman) Hondiashvili worked in Israel as a prize-winning chef. American actor Jon Voight traveled to Israel and met with children victims of terror including the daughter of Hondiashvili; the actor was moved by the young girl's letter in which she wrote: "Creator of the world, please bring peace to the world." Natalia Gamril emigrated from St. Petersburg, Russia to Israel with her daughter in 1993. Gamril was on her way to her work caring for an elderly woman as the bomb in the bus killed her. She lived together with her daughter Svetlana in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Kiryat HaYovel.
Yechezkel Isser Goldberg, known as "Chezi", was born in Toronto, Canada and immigrated to Israel where he found work in Jerusalem as a counselor to at-risk adolescents and their relatives. Goldberg had himself written journalism two years prior to his death, about the dangers of terrorism in Israel. Writing for Israel National News in 2002, Goldberg commented, "The bomber could very well be someone I have seen in a passing moment. I think we are in this bloody mess because many of the politicos making life-and-death decisions for this country have forgotten that terror is just a five-minute ride from home, anywhere."
Injuries
ORT Israel computer science instructor, Masha Novikova, sustained heavy injuries in the bombing. She had immigrated from Moscow, Russia, to Israel twenty years previous. After the bombing, her concerns for safety improvements for the people of Jerusalem led her to run for city council in 2008 under the political party of Yisrael Beiteinu. She became leader of the local party of Yisrael Beiteinu in Jerusalem. She served on the city council in 2013.
The Jerusalem Post journalist, Erik Schechter, faced injuries sustained as a passenger on Bus 19. Schechter thought his own leg was mangled at the bombing scene, and that he was going to die, until a policeman on scene pulled someone else's flesh from Schechter's leg. Though initially his injuries were classified as "moderate" — Schechter suffered a shattered kneecap, vascular damage, and wounds from shrapnel. Schechter's recovery from his injuries at the suicide bombing took months. Schechter's colleague, editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post Bret Stephens, had arrived minutes after the bombing, and in the chaos failed to spot his fellow journalist at the scene.
Israeli author and literary editor, Zeruya Shalev, was severely injured in the bus bombing. She had just finished bringing her daughter to her kindergarten class. She was on her way back to her residence in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Rehavia and was on the street outside of the bus when the bomb exploded. She was badly hurt, and her wounds required a four month recovery process. She was unable to return to her work as an author, and was immobilized and bedridden during her recovery period. Shalev commented on her recovery process: "I was in bed for half a year—for the first time in my life, I had a lot of time. ... I tried to write, but it was impossible." She recalled that her physical recovery parallelled her ability to return to writing: "I remember so well the day I was able to put my feet on the ground, then how slowly I started to walk again, to sit on a chair, to sit in front of the computer."
Official reactions
Israel
Prime Minister of Israel Ariel Sharon was stationed at his farm Havat Shikmim in the South of the country when the bomb went off. Raanan Gissin, spokesperson for the Prime Minister's office, emphasized the West Bank barrier would decrease the prevalence of such terrorist attacks going forwards. Prime Minister Sharon representative David Baker referenced the bus bombing in asserting the Palestinian Authority was doing, "absolutely nothing to stop this terror". Jerusalem police chief Mickey Levy lamented the severity of the terrorist attack's impact, "It was a very serious attack on a bus packed with passengers." Shlomo Aharonishki, commander of the national police in Israel, stated to journalists that the bus bombing, "proved once again that there is no change of strategy on the other side. They are still trying to carry out attacks, any way they can. He emphasized similar bombings had been prevented by Israeli security services: "The thin line that divides between today's severe attack and dozens of cases in which attacks were thwarted is (formed by) the security forces, the Israel Defense Forces, the Shabak (security service) and the police."
Prime Minister Sharon met with the Defense Minister of Israel, Shaul Mofaz, in Lod on the day of the bombing to discuss their country's response. During the bombing, Mofaz had been in the midst of a meeting in Tel Aviv, with U.S. diplomats John Wolf and David M. Satterfield on the peace process. After the meeting, Mofaz gathered the heads of the country's defense apparatus to map out their plan. They decided not to close entry and exit from the Palestinian territories in response to the attack.
The day of the bombing, Israel had a previously scheduled prisoner-hostage exchange planned with the Lebanese Shia Islamist paramilitary group Hezbollah. The Israeli government decided to go ahead with the exchange after the bombing, and coordinated the prisoner release four hours after the explosion. They released 400 Palestinian prisoners of Israel into the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The country also released another 29 individuals primarily from Lebanon, in a deal brought about through participation of diplomats from Germany. Some of the Arab and Lebanese citizens released were taken by airplane from Israel to Germany. Through the same coordinated deal, Hezbollah released Israeli businessman Elhanan Tannenbaum who they had kidnapped, and the bodies of three soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces who had been ambushed by the paramilitary group in 2000. The IDF soldiers: Omar Suad, Adi Avitan, and Benny Avraham, had been used by Hezbollah for external messaging when their bodies were in the group's possession. Avraham had previously participated in a joint communal program with the Jewish community of the Tidewater Region, Virginia. The exchange deal between Israel and Hezbollah had been negotiated over several years prior. As part of the exchange deal, Hezbollah pledged to reveal information about the disappearance of Ron Arad, an Israeli Air Force weapon systems officer missing in action.
Prime Minister Sharon attended the reception of Tannenbaum and the IDF soldiers' remains at Ben Gurion Airport later the same day as the bombing. He made public remarks contrasting the somber nature of the bombing, the reception of the soldiers, and the recovery of the kidnap victim. Sharon stated, "The reality of our lives enforces upon us at times the dreadful mixing of sadness with sadness, of sadness with joy." He explained the Israeli government's decision to continue the prisoner-hostage exchange deal the same day as the bombing, stating the choice was motivated by "Jewish sentiment" and a commitment by the country to "bring the boys home, to the soil of our homeland".
Sharon canceled a planned meeting between Palestinian and Israeli government officials and countries providing funding to both, as a result of the bus bombing. The meeting would have been about improving living conditions for Palestinians. Silvan Shalom, Israeli Foreign Minister, released a joint statement with the Prime Minister explaining their rationale for canceling the meeting: "There is no room for such discussions on this difficult day where innocent civilians were murdered on the streets of the capital of Israel." Shalom requested the Palestinian Authority government carry out their assertions they would work to decrease terrorist acts by Palestinian people, or, "there will not be progress in the peace process".