Ahlam Tamimi
Palestinian /Jordanian Islamic terrorist; assisted in carrying out the 2001 Sbarro restaurant suicide bombing in Jerusalem
Ahlam Aref Ahmad al-Tamimi (Arabic: أحلام عرف أحمد التميمي; born 1980) is a Jordanian national known for assisting in carrying out the Sbarro restaurant suicide bombing in Jerusalem, in 2001. She was convicted by an Israeli military tribunal and received multiple life sentences, but was released in 2011 as part of the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange and exiled to Jordan. She hosts a television show about Palestinians in Israeli prisons.
Background
Al-Tamimi was born in Zarqa, Jordan.
Tamimi was a journalism student at Birzeit University in the West Bank. Her brother Mohamed speculates that her fluency in English and the fact that she did not wear a headscarf made her less suspicious to Israeli officials.
Tamimi originates from Nabi Salih, a Palestinian village in the central West Bank. Ben Ehrenreich of The New York Times said that she was "much-loved in Nabi Saleh".
Earlier bombing
Tamimi placed an explosive device at a grocery store in Jerusalem in July 2001, which exploded, but did not cause damage.
Sbarro restaurant suicide bombing
Tamimi helped plan and participated in the Sbarro restaurant suicide bombing, which caused 145 casualties, including 16 fatalities, half of them children.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Ahlam Tamimi” is palestinian /Jordanian Islamic terrorist; assisted in carrying out the 2001 Sbarro restaurant suicide bombing in Jerusalem. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Ahlam, Tamimi and Palestinian, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “palestinian /Jordanian Islamic terrorist; assisted in carrying out the 2001 Sbarro restaurant suicide bombing in Jerusalem” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q12178430. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1980, 2001 and 2011.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ahlam Tamimi” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.