Cousin of Scottish student killed in 2002 Tel Aviv attack grapples with release of terrorist who drove suicide bomber

The cousin of a Scottish student who died in a Tel Aviv bus bombing in 2002 grapples with the release during an ongoing hostage-ceasefire deal with Hamas of a terrorist convicted of driving the suicide bomber to carry out the attack, in an op-ed in The Free Press.

Rabbi Gideon Black, who himself survived the 2002 terror attack, writes, “Ashraf Zughayer, the Hamas leader who arranged for the killing of my cousin and attempted to have me killed, got out of prison January 25 as part of the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas. He had served 22 years of what were supposed to be six life sentences—one for each person whose murder he orchestrated.”

“The moments after the explosion are still vivid in my mind—the shattered glass, the heap of skinless bodies at the front of the bus, the few silent seconds as an aura of death hung in the air before it gave way to piercing sirens and screams,” he writes.

Yoni Jesner was 19 when he came from Glasgow, Scotland, to study at Yeshivat Har Etzion and was killed, along with five others, in a September bombing that year during the Second Intifada.

Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack, in which a suicide bomber set off an explosive charge aboard a bus on Allenby Street.

“Yoni was bound for medical school in London following our time in yeshiva… Though in his life he was deprived of the opportunity to save lives as a doctor, in death he was not, his donated organs saving three people: two Jewish men from Tel Aviv and an 8-year-old Muslim girl from East Jerusalem, Yasmin Abu Ramilah, who received one of Yoni’s kidneys after years on dialysis,” the rabbi writes.

Zughayer is one of some 2,000 Palestinian security prisoners, including hundreds serving life sentences, who are being freed in exchange for hostages held in Gaza as part of the deal with Hamas that began in January.

Footage posted to social media last week showed the Hamas terrorist atop a slow-moving pickup truck at the center of a celebration for the released Palestinian security prisoners in Jerusalem’s Kafr Aqab neighborhood, though police banned such demonstrations.

مشاهد من استقبال الأسير المقدسي المحرر أشرف زغير في كفر عقب ، يذكر أنه محكوم بالمؤبد 6 مرات وستين عاماً، وقد أفرج عنه اليوم ضمن صفقة طوفان الأحرار pic.twitter.com/XyirBYGtTf

— شبكة قدس الإخبارية (@qudsn) January 25, 2025

But while he writes that “releasing terrorists has been proven to lead to more terror,” Black ultimately concludes that releasing the hostages held by Hamas in Gaza since October 7, 2023, “takes precedence.”

“We must move mountains to bring them home, even as we fear that those very mountains may bury our loved ones in the future. The moral dilemma is excruciating,” he writes.