The Israeli teenager, 16, and her sister, Tehila, 19, were employees at the Sbarro pizza parlor in Jerusalem. When asked to baby-sit their nephew Aug. 9, Mili found a replacement at the restaurant, but Tehila was not so fortunate.
She was working the cash register when a Hamas suicide bomber stepped up to the counter and detonated a bomb, killing Tehila and 14 other Israelis in the second-worst terror attack since the Palestinian intifada began last year.
On Wednesday, Mili and her family were there when Israeli officials and U.S. Ambassador Dan Kurtzer joined employees and victims for the reopening of the rebuilt restaurant that all agreed was an example for the United States in how to respond to terrorism.
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The message in the speedy reopening was that no terrorist was going to defeat the survivors by permanently altering the way they live, work or enjoy a slice of pizza.
“I’m here for my sister,” said Mili, wearing her red uniform cap and surrounded by her French immigrant father, mother and brother. “We had to reopen.”
Message to world
For Israelis, veterans in dealing with terrorist acts, Tuesday’s attacks were a belated message to the rest of the world about the seriousness of such threats.
Many said it was time the world united against terrorism and showed more understanding of the tough tactics they use against the Palestinians.
Many Israelis felt sure that the U.S. State Department would no longer condemn the Israeli army for targeted killings of Palestinian militia leaders, or doubt their warnings about the threat of Islamic fundamentalists.
“The dreadful attack [in the United States] works in our favor in terms of public relations,” wrote Ehud Sprinzak, an Israeli expert on terrorist and extremist groups, in the Maariv newspaper. “The pictures are terrible, and they are better than a thousand ambassadors trying to explain how dangerous Islamic terror is.”
Other Israelis advised against jumping to conclusions about who was guilty for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Meanwhile, the Palestinian uprising has continued, and the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has been carrying out an emboldened operation to eliminate suspected terrorists in the West Bank city of Jenin, which Israel has labeled a “hornet’s nest” of suicide bomb planners.
Tanks, bulldozers
The Israeli army encircled the city Tuesday, and Palestinian officials said at least seven Palestinians were killed when tanks and bulldozers entered the city and two nearby villages overnight.
Included among the dead were three suspected Islamic militants, killed when Israel shelled a house, and an 11-year-old girl, Palestinians said.
Three more Palestinians, all security officers, were killed when their convoy of unmarked cars came under fire from Israeli helicopters near the village of Tamoun.
Later in the day, an Israeli motorist was shot and killed by Palestinian gunmen near the West Bank city of Qalqilya.
The army began its siege on Jenin after a series of terrorist bombings and shootings Sunday. But Defense Ministry officials indicated they believed that the international attitude has changed toward dealing with terrorism.
“Now the world will not be as patient as it was before to the terror conducted and supported by the Palestinian Authority,” Yarden Vatikay, a ministry spokesman, told The Associated Press.
Palestinian officials accused Sharon of using the tragedy in the United States as a cover to begin an even more ruthless siege against them.
“We are burying 11 Palestinians today,” said Ghassan Khattib, a Palestinian commentator. “We call on the international community to pay attention to what is going on here.”
Kurtzer, the U.S. ambassador to Israel for just a few weeks, said that he came to the Jerusalem restaurant reopening to show solidarity with the Israelis and that neither country would back down “in the face of terror.”
“We [Americans] have overcome things like this before and we are strong enough to do it again,” Kurtzer said.
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