February 25, 1994: While worshippers in the Ibrahimi Mosque in the city of Hebron were at Friday’s dawn prayer, showers of bullets began raining down on them from all directions, killing more than 350 worshippers and injuring countless others.

And thus began the second chapter of this terrorist massacre at the hands of terrorist settler Baroukh Goldstein and his helpers. As for the first chapter, it had begun at the hour for the final evening prayer on Thursday, at which time Jewish settlers and soldiers prevented Muslim worshippers from entering the sacred masque to perform the evening prayer under the pretext that this was the day of their “Boleme” feast. Terrorist settlers gathered in the outer courtyards of the mosque and began setting off fireworks in the direction of the worshippers. Some time after this, the occupation forces allowed them to go inside the mosque itself in groups. At 10:00 p.m. the Muslim worshippers were asked to leave the mosque, and Zionist occupation soldiers began beating many of them as they left.

Hatim Qufaysha, a witness of the Zionist crime, says, “At 5:20 a.m. today everyone was standing up [in the mosque]. As I took off my shoes, I saw an old man wearing military clothes who was running along carrying a huge weapon loaded with ammunition. I was surprised to see him come into the mosque during the prayer. He opened fire, and I ran away and asked the soldier who guards the area to intervene, but all he did was beat me up, then I left the mosque area.

Eye witnesses who survived the massacre say, “We heard the sound of a muffled explosion. It was followed by the whiz of bullets passing over the heads of the worshippers.” Talal Abu Sunayna, who was shot in both shoulders, adds, “I saw a settler hiding behind one of the pillars in the mosque’ as he fired on the worshippers with his rifle. Another [Jewish] settler stood beside him loading a second rifle so that it would be ready to go to work next.” Muhammad Sari, one of the worshippers present at the time of the massacre, states, “People are used to attending the dawn prayer on Fridays in large numbers.” He estimated the number of worshippers present that morning at about 500. Then he added, “the muezzin announced the beginning of the prayer, so we knelt and made the first prostration. Then all of a sudden we heard the sound of heavy gun fire coming from behind us. When I turned around in the direction of the sound, I saw a soldier in full uniform. He had put ear pieces in his ears, and he was holding a rapid-firing machine gun and firing in the direction of the worshippers.” S ari was wounded in both legs when he tried to stand up. A number of young men were able to get over to where the attacker was and to protect others in the mosque with their bodies. And within moments Goldstein had been brought to the ground by the young men. Unfortunately, due to the heavy gun fire, the mosque had turned into something on the order of a slaughterhouse, filled with pools of blood. Muhammad Sulayman Abu Salih, a custodian at the Abrahamic mosque, describes the terrifying sight inside the mosque saying, “The terrorist was trying to kill as many people as possible. The corpses were scattered all over, spattering the floor of the mosque with blood.

Worshippers who had been prostrating tried to flee in terror, and some of them fell on the floor.” Then he adds, “I shouted at the top of my lungs to the soldiers to come and stop him, but all they did was run away. The armed man reloaded his rifle at least once and killed at least seven people at one time, the contents of their skulls scattering all over the floor. He kept on shooting for ten minutes, and the army didn’t step in until the massacre was over.”

Sheikh Ibrahim Abdeen, the Imam of the mosque, says that the bullets were coming from several places, that it was a true blood bath. The Israeli soldiers’ reaction was very slow; they actually delayed the arrival of the ambulances. Nor did this terrorist massacre stop with the killing of Goldstein. When the shooting stopped, the soldiers came pouring into the mosque. According to witnesses of the massacre, the soldiers, together with a number of Jewish settlers, opened fire on those who had gathered around Goldstein, and not one of them survived. And thus, the second massacre. Then outside the mosque, the soldiers opened fire on the ambulance which had arrived at the mosque to treat the wounded; thus occurred the third massacre, which itself did not stop there, since the soldiers pursued the wounded and those seeking to treat them as far as the doors of the hospitals, where they proceeded to kill even more. Other forces pursued their victims’ funeral processions as far as the cemetery gates, where they killed still more. Hence, this heinous massacre carried out against worshippers at the Ibrahimi Mosque led to more than 24 deaths and injured hundreds of others.