Baruch Kopel Goldstein. On February 25, 1994, that year's Purim day, Goldstein entered a room in the Cave of the Patriarchs that was serving as a mosque, wearing "his army uniform with the insignia of rank, creating the image of a reserve officer on active duty." He then opened fire, killing 29 worshippers and wounding more than 125. Mosque guard Mohammad Suleiman Abu Saleh said he thought that Goldstein was trying to kill as many people as possible and described how there were "bodies and blood everywhere". Eventually, Goldstein was overcome and beaten to death by survivors of the massacre. According to Ian Lustick, "by mowing down Arabs he believed wanted to kill Jews, Goldstein was reenacting part of the Purim story."
Palestinian riots immediately followed the shooting; in the following week, 25 Palestinians were killed by the Israel Defense Forces, and five Israelis were killed as well. According to Aditi Bhaduri, writing in The Hindu, following the riots, Israel imposed a two-week curfew on the 120,000 Palestinian residents of Hebron. Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin telephoned PLO leader Yasser Arafat, and described the attack as a "loathsome, criminal act of murder". The Israeli government condemned the massacre, and responded by arresting followers of Meir Kahane, forbidding certain settlers from entering Arab towns, and demanding that those settlers turn in their army-issued rifles.[4] Goldstein was immediately "denounced with shocked horror even by the mainstream Orthodox",\ and most in Israel classified Goldstein as insane.
