Diameter of the Bomb

A Story of Tragedy, An Unmitigated Tragedy.
My feelings, & thoughts, after seeing this film are profoundly divided.

The title of the film is taken from that of a poem by the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai.

It touches on the lives of some of those killed in a suicide bombing of Jerusalem bus 32A on June 18th, 2002. 19 Israeli dead, 14 were residents of Gilo, a suburb of Jerusalem, built on land annexed by Israel after the Six Day War (google the name for details). The 20th body found, was that of the terrorist bomber ("al- shaheed"), Muhammad al- Ral, a law student at An-Najah University in Nablus. 74 others were wounded in the bombing.

This was one of the worst attacks of the Second Intifada.

So this is a story of utter tragedy, not only for those who died on that terrible day, but for us all. Of the twenty dead, the film only explicitly touches on six. Three Israeli girls, Michal & Shani, one Israeli Ethiopian Christian girl Galila; & then (more briefly) two Israeli males Ayman &...

No sense of the wider picture
On June 18, 2002, a Hamas suicide bomber named Mohammed Al Ghoul detonated a bomb on bus 32A in Jerusalem. Twenty people died and 50 were injured, at the time the worst bombing in the region in six years. 16 months after, families of the victims and medical personnel are interviewed for a vivid portrait of how one brutal act can affect so many. There are also interviews of the Palestinian family of the bomber, home-videos of the perpetrator, who is educating himself at University to be a lawyer, and his suicide video statement dressed in green.He is by no means deprived.He will 'die so future generations may live'.

This documentary by Steven Silver and Andrew Quigley combines forensic footage released by the IDF,the inability of the police and secret service to forestall the killer,who they were on the alert for,but couldn't pinpoint: does he come from Jerusalem or outside?Friends and relatives struggle to piece back together fragments of their own lives and of the loved...



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