On February 25, 1994, a medical doctor and American settler named Baruch Goldstein walked into the Cave of the Patriarchs, part of the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, where Bashir had received his aqiqa ceremony in 1943. The settler from Brooklyn pulled an M-16 from beneath his coat and opened fire, killing twenty-nine Palestinians praying in the mosque. Survivors pummeled him to death. Six weeks later, Hamas, the militant Islamic organization, abandoned its strategy of attacking only Israeli military targets. On April 6, a car bomb exploded in the Israeli town of Afula, killing six Israeli
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