Ahmet Yusuf OzdemirThe constant flow of news coming out of the Middle East, especially from Palestine since October 7, 2023, has been difficult to follow in detail.
We reached a level where some reports were more important than others, while a few almost immediately vanished from the news cycle.
One such story unfolded on Thursday night, February 20, 2025, after bombs exploded on three empty passenger buses. The incident rattled Tel Aviv and sent Israeli officials frothing at the mouth as they called for retaliation.
As expected, Israel was quick to blame the Palestinian resistance. Reports soon flooded social media, claiming that Palestinian groups had carried out the bombing in response to recent Israeli raids in the occupied West Bank.
Israeli authorities even claimed to have found a note along with an unexploded IED that read, “Martyrs, Nasrallah, Sinwar”, priming the ground for pinning the blame on the Palestinians.
Israeli news outlets were also quick to blame Qassam Brigades Tulkarm Battalion for the bombing, something the group categorically denied.
But there was no stopping the war-mongering Israeli crowd. Hours after the bombings, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered his military to conduct an operation in the occupied West Bank.
The next day, Netanyahu was photographed sitting inside a Palestinian home in the Tulkarem refugee camp with military commanders with an Israeli flag put up on the wall, adding to the humiliation of Palestinians forced out of their homes.
Over subsequent days, the news cycle moved on to other stories as Israel spread unverified allegations surrounding the death of the Bibas family members and regional countries focused on bringing the ceasefire back on track.
So who planted bombs on the buses and detonated them? Here’s what we know about the publicly available details related to the investigation into the blasts.
Israeli authorities have imposed a three-week publication ban on details related to bus explosions. The ban came after Israel's internal security service (Shin Bet) announced the arrest of two Jewish Israelis suspected of involvement in the incident.
An Israeli court extended the detention of one Israeli suspect by 10 days.
The Israeli government has barred the suspect from meeting his lawyer. The search for additional suspects and accomplices is still ongoing. The lawyer of one of the suspects rejected the accusations. He described his client as someone who “loves the Land of Israel and its people.”
We don't have more information because Israel has effectively prohibited any information from coming out.
However, if the long history of Israeli “counterterrorism” has taught us anything, it is that if the attackers were indeed from the occupied West Bank, their names and faces would have been all over the Israeli media, and their homes would have long been demolished.
The arrest of two Jewish Israelis related to bus bombings should serve as a reminder of the intricate relationship between the violent Jewish far-right movements and the Israeli state.
The arrest of a Jewish Israeli suspect by Shin Bet in Tel Aviv bus explosion draws attention to Netanyahu's construction of an imaginary Arab enemy and justification for intensifying offensive in occupied West Bank.
The violent history of Zionism
The roads that led to the creation of the state of Israel were paved by violent underground groups that acted in the name of Jewishness and Zionism.
From 1920 to 1948, Zionist organisations such as Haganah (Hebrew literal translation meaning Defence), Irgun (officially called the National Military Organization in the Land of Israel), and Lehi (officially called Fighters for the Freedom of Israel), spread terror in Palestine and beyond.
Even though these groups had differences, they were united in their goal to establish a Zionist state on the occupied lands of Palestine. Originally, these outfits were expected to dissolve after Israel’s creation.
Instead, they were legalised, and many of their leaders made their way into Israeli politics and the military. Their leaders included Zionist ideologues such as Ze'ev Jabotinsky. They also included David Ben-Gurion and Menachem Begin, who later became Israel’s prime ministers.
Victims of pre-1948 Zionist violence included the Arabs living in Palestine and the ruling elite, the British.
Haganah, Irgun, and Lehi were involved in assassination campaigns against the British diplomats stationed in the region and even bombed the King David Hotel, which was used as the British administrative headquarters for Mandatory Palestine, killing 91 people and injuring 46.
They also resorted to ethnic-cleansing operations against the Palestinians, such as the Deir Yassin massacre, which took place on April 9, 1948, in which 107 Palestinians were killed, one example of many such atrocities.
Zionist terrorism didn’t limit itself to Palestinian lands but operated internationally.
In October 1946, an Irgun cell based in Italy carried out a bomb attack on the British embassy in Rome. This was followed by a series of sabotage operations targeting British military transport routes in Germany between late 1946 and early 1947.
In March 1947, an Irgun operative planted a bomb at the Colonial Club near St Martin’s Lane in central London, which shattered windows and doors, injuring several service members.
The following month, a female Irgun agent placed a large bomb containing 24 sticks of explosives at the Colonial Office in London. However, it didn’t explode.
These Zionist groups were behind a letter-bomb campaign that was initiated in Britain and involved a total of 21 bombs aimed at key English cabinet members.
After the creation of Israel, the far-right violent Zionists became part of the state apparatus, becoming politicians and leaders of the settler movement, which wants to take over the Palestinian land despite UN and wide-spread international opposition.
On the other hand, a third group directly tried to disrupt the peace talks between Israel and local or regional actors.
US-born Rabbi Meir Kahane founded the Jewish Defense League in 1968, an organisation that specifically targeted the Arab community in the United States and called for expulsions of all Arabs from the land of Palestine and occupied territories.
As David Sheen observed, Kahane “openly incited the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians—and all other non-Jews who refused to accept unvarnished apartheid—from Israel and the territories it occupied. He outdid all other Israeli eliminationists with his insistence that killing those he identified as Israel’s enemies was not only a strategic necessity but an act of worship.”
Kahane tried to make his views heard in Israeli politics and escape conviction in the United States. He returned to Israel in 1971, founded the Kach Party, and even won enough votes to enter the parliament in 1984.
Kahane’s time in Israel also coincided with the rise of similar strains of far-right and violent Jewish underground groups.
Gush Emunim (the Block of the Faithful) is one of the most significant among such organisations. It was an “Israeli messianic movement committed to establishing Jewish settlements in the West Bank.”
It turned into the organiser of one of the most horrific terror attempts in Palestine, where its armed wing, popularly known as Jewish Underground, planned to blow up one of the holiest Muslim sites, Qubbat al Sakhra, or Dome of the Rock, for ideological-religious reasons.
Their modus operandi mirrored the events of the Tel Aviv bus explosions on February 20.
About 40 years ago, in 1984, the Jewish Underground placed explosives in the five buses that would carry Arabs. Still, at the last moment, the whole conspiracy was exposed. The bombs were defused in time, and the Israeli security agency Shin Bet arrested members of the organisation. However, they were soon pardoned and released after short prison terms.
It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to argue that the Jewish far-right aimed to disrupt peace efforts in the region.
In 1994, Kahane’s party was declared a terrorist organisation by the Israeli government after one of the followers of Kahane, a US-born Jewish settler named Baruch Goldstein, opened fire on Palestinian Muslims during Friday prayers in the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, killing 29 of them.
The fate of Yitzhak Rabin, the fifth prime minister of Israel who signed the Oslo agreement and shook hands with Arafat, shouldn’t be forgotten. Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish Israeli, Yigal Amir, yet another follower of Kahane, who considered the premier a traitor who needed to be killed.
From the 1990s to date, the Israeli far-right has penetrated into politics their narrative that is openly propagated by high-level officials such as Benjamin Netanyahu (prime minister), Itamar Ben-Gvir (minister of national security), and Yoav Gallant (minister of defence).
Considering this intricate relationship between the far-right and the government, the political elite and war cabinet use bus attacks as a false flag operation. Keeping in view Israeli intelligence capabilities inside the occupied territories, it is almost impossible for Israel not to find perpetrators if they were Palestinians. So far, in the Israeli media, the two arrested Jewish Israelis are regarded as collaborators, not terrorists, because they drove the attackers to the buses.
