The funeral of Ionas Karussis (Karousis), one of the seven people killed on Tuesday during a terrorist shooting spree at a Tel Aviv light rail station, took place on Saturday at the Greek Orthodox Holy Zion cemetery in Jerusalem’s old city, according to an announcement on Friday.
A memorial service for Karussis, who studied architecture at an Israeli university, took place in his ancestral Thessaloniki the same day.
The 26-year-old dual citizen (Greek and Israeli) was gunned down by two Palestinian terrorists from the West Bank.
Large crowds of mourners gathered at both solemn services.
“We still haven’t realized what has happened. I think we’ll wake up in the morning and go on doing all the things we always did. He was a cultivated young man. Unfortunately, he left just as he was finishing his degree and was about to start working to build his career as an architect,” said Karussis’ uncle.
“He had gone to do a project for his school. He went to document a space and sadly was shot with four bullets in the chest. It’s very unfair what has happened; I can’t digest it,” he stated.
Karussis was born in Israel to two Greek physicians who emigrated to the Mideast country from the northern city of Thessaloniki in 1988.
He was the only child of Dimitris Karussis, the head of the Hadassah BrainLabs Institute’s MS centre and unit of neuroimmunology and cell therapies, and pediatrician Ourania Vourka.
Karussis, an accomplished pianist who spoke and wrote in Hebrew, Greek and English, began his tertiary level studies at the University of Tel Aviv in 2020, after completing military service in Israel.
He was gunned down during an attack that coincided with Iran’s missile attack on Israeli targets.
Social media post attracts heat
In a related and eyebrow-raising development, a Greek-language post on social media by an account self-identified as the “Palestinian Community of Greece”, generated a firestorm of reactions and condemnation in the country.
A translation of the inflammatory Tweet on X reads:
“It’s with great sadness that we address the tragic death of Ionas, a Greek citizen who lost his life in Israel. However, it is important to clarify that, unfortunately, Ionas was not an innocent citizen visiting Israel. He was a member of the Israeli army. This disturbing fact raises an important question: Why did he feel the need to go to Israel, a place of conflict, and die there when Greece is his real homeland!”
The tweet has subsequently been deleted from social media.
