Tzrifin bus stop attack: what Wikipedia removed
The Tzrifin attack was a 2003 Hamas suicide bombing at an Israeli military base that killed nine IDF soldiers. The 2015 opening described the bomber as “a member of the Palestinian militant Islamist organization Hamas.” Today the word militant occurs nowhere in the article, and the opening instead calls the attacker “a terrorist sent by the Hamas.” A reader today does not learn how Wikipedia’s own opening once characterized Hamas itself, the organization behind the attack, as a militant Islamist organization.
The word “militant” appeared 1 times in this article’s opening at its peak, in 2015. Today it appears nowhere in the article at all, references included. Checked against the full current article on 2026-08-01.
The tracked words, snapshot by snapshot
Section titled “The tracked words, snapshot by snapshot”| word | 2015 | 2020 | 6 October 2023 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| militant | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| terror | 0 | 0 | 0 | 3 |
| islamist | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
Counts are of the opening paragraph only, the part most readers, search engines and AI training sets ever quote.
What was taken out
Section titled “What was taken out”- The date format was reworded, from ‘September 9, 2003’ to ‘9 September 2003,’ with no substantive change.
- The description of Hamas as a ‘militant Islamist organization,’ dropped from the opening.
How it opened then, and now
Section titled “How it opened then, and now”2015 (revision 522440009):
The Tzrifin attack was a suicide bombing which occurred on September 9, 2003 in a bus stop in central Israel next to the military base Tzrifin . 9 people were killed in the attack and more than 15 people were injured. The suicide bomber was a member of the Palestinian militant Islamist organization Hamas and was a resident of the Palestinian village Rantis in the West Bank .
2025 (revision 1283972232):
2003 suicide bombing in Israel The bus station where the attack took place The Tzrifin attack was a suicide bombing , which occurred on 9 September 2003 in a bus stop in central Israel next to the military base Tzrifin . 9 IDF soldiers were killed in the attack and more than 15 soldiers were injured. The attack was carried out by a terrorist sent by the Hamas from Beit Liqya . He blew himself up inside the hitchhiking station at the Jaffa Gate of Camp Tzrifin, during an evening hour when dozens of soldiers and civilians were waiting there. The steel structure of the hitchhiking station absorbed part of the explosion’s force, with many metal fragments and shrapnel embedded in it, thereby prev…
Related
Section titled “Related”- The drift report: what changed across all 61,944 watched articles
- The case file for this article, with every snapshot and every marked removal
- Who made the cuts: removals grouped by the account that made them
- The live article on Wikipedia
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