Argentina on Thursday will mark the 25th anniversary of the Israeli Embassy bombing in Buenos Aires in which 29 people were killed and over 200 were wounded. Senior Foreign Ministry officials are leading the Israeli delegation, which also includes family members of Israelis killed in the attack. For prior anniversaries, a siren was sounded to mark the time of the bombing. "The memory of those terrible days in Argentina is etched on our hearts, the images never fading from our minds," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said last week at a memorial event at the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem. Netanyahu pointed an accusatory finger at Iran, saying that as early as 1992, soon after the attack, Israel knew who was behind the bombing. The Islamic republic "is the biggest instigator of terror in the universe" and aspires to "have a nuclear weapon and is advancing its ballistic missile program," Netanyahu said. He said that one of Israel's security agencies believes that "over 80% of Israel's fundamental security problems originate in Iran," and that Israel is coping with these problems by growing stronger itself. Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility shortly after the explosion, but those directly responsible for the attack have never been found guilty. Most investigators believe a truck outside the embassy was detonated to cause the explosion. Another theory says explosives were brought inside the embassy during a remodeling project. The attack was followed two years later by an even larger one at the offices of the Argentine Israeli Mutual Association (AMIA). In that attack, 85 people were killed and hundreds more were wounded. In 2007, Argentine authorities secured Interpol arrest warrants for five Iranians and a Lebanese national in connection with the AMIA attack. Alberto Nisman, the prosecutor investigating the bombing at AMIA, was found dead with a bullet to the head in his Buenos Aires apartment in 2015. While authorities have said they believe Hezbollah, with Iranian support, may have been behind the embassy attack, nothing has ever been proved and no one is behind bars. Argentina has Latin America's largest Jewish community, with an estimated 250,000 people, many descended from immigrants who fled oppression in Europe in the early 20th century for what was then one of the world's richest countries.
