Posted on 05/30/2002 9:34:16 AM PDT by martin_fierro
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Thauriya Hamamreh changed her mind about carrying out a suicide bombing when orders to disguise herself in provocative clothes for the attack in Jerusalem made her do some soul-searching.
The petite, headscarfed 25-year-old Palestinian woman told her story to Israeli journalists from a prison cell where she has been kept since Israeli forces arrested her on May 20.
Hamamreh, a devout Muslim, said her handlers in the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed group linked to President Yasser Arafat (news - web sites)'s Fatah (news - web sites) faction, wanted her to disguise herself as a modern Israeli woman so she would not raise suspicion.
"They wanted me to have my hair loose, wear sun glasses and makeup and tight clothes. I said no because it's against my religion," the Maariv newspaper quoted her on Thursday as telling reporters.
A day before the planned attack, Hamamreh began pondering the "righteousness" of the task and whether she would be accepted as a martyr in paradise because she volunteered mostly for personal reasons, including feelings of social isolation after being rejected by a man she had hoped to marry.
"I started thinking that I would be killing babies, women and sick people and imagined what it would be like if my family were sitting in a restaurant and someone bombed them," she said.
Hamamreh skipped the transportation that had been arranged to take her from the West Bank city of Nablus to Jerusalem and instead went to her aunt's house in Tulkarm where Israeli troops, acting on intelligence information, arrested her.
If she had gone through with the attack, she would have been part of a growing trend of Palestinian women opting to become suicide bombers in a 20-month-old uprising against occupation.
Four Palestinian women have carried out suicide bombings including Wafa Idrees, a medic whom relatives said wanted to avenge Israel's killing of Palestinians. Idrees's husband had divorced her for not being able to have children.
"They think what they are doing is something that will contribute positively to the liberation of their country," said Palestinian sociologist Nader Said from Bir Zeit University.
"These women are fed up with occupation, it's an everyday ordeal for them and they can do nothing about it."
Idrees killed an 81-year-old man who was on his way to buy paints for his art hobby at a store in Jerusalem in January.
FEMALE SUICIDE BOMBERS
Said said some of the suicide bombers, men and women, were socially isolated -- such as one bomber who suffered from epilepsy -- and were trying to gain social acceptance.
"Many of them feel powerless in all other aspects of their life but now...they can change reality, they can prove to their mothers and fathers and schoolteachers that they are worth something," he told Reuters.
An 18-year-old female bomber killed an Israeli teenager and a security guard when she blew herself up on March 29 at a Jerusalem supermarket. Another blew herself up prematurely at an Israeli roadblock and the fourth woman bomber killed six people at a Jerusalem market earlier in the month.
Hamamreh, a dressmaker and florist, was sent to Nablus for training before the attack. She was taken to an empty apartment where she and two other suicide bombers were fitted for their bombs and taught how to activate the detonator.
Her bomb was so heavy -- containing 35 pounds of explosives and stuffed with cloth-filled bags of metal pieces -- that the petite woman struggled to carry the weight, Maariv quoted her as saying.
"It reached from my waist to my chest," she told the newspaper. The bomb was supposed to be hidden in a student's backpack and Hamamreh was instructed to find a crowd of people as quickly as possibly and blow herself up, the paper said.
Her operators told her if she thought she was under suspicion she should blow herself up to avoid being captured and interrogated, she told the newspaper.
Hamamreh, who looked much younger than her age in newspaper photographs, also had advice for would-be female bombers.
"Women who want to wage Jihad (holy struggle) should start a family and have children," she told the newspaper.
Yes, you would be killing babies, mothers, fathers, etc. Thank you for listening to your heart, hopefully more will be so inspired. This insanity has to end.
IIRC they are worth $25,000.
Shalom.
Total nudity! A naked society is a polite and peaceful society. Support total nudity in the middle east for peace (except for Yassir Arafat). No place to hide bombs and helps stop shoplifting. It might even get their minds on something besides war.
It's this whole "women-in-combat" thing come home to roost with the PLA. What's the world coming to? Struggles to carry the 35lb. bomb. Aborts the mission. Wants to have children. Ah! The younger generation! What will become of them??? When will they learn from their elders that until they gain wisdom they should do as they are told?
Oh, wait. Maybe some of them have figured it out...
"I started thinking that I would be killing babies, women and sick people and imagined what it would be like if my family were sitting in a restaurant and someone bombed them," she said
We need people like this.. people that can value life.
"Many of them feel powerless in all other aspects of their life but now...they can change reality, they can prove to their mothers and fathers and schoolteachers that they are worth something," he told Reuters.
"These women are fed up with occupation, it's an everyday ordeal for them and they can do nothing about it."
I don't believe these two sentences. Its all to obvious that she was depressed from loosing her man. To some, having a mate is everything. When you aint got nothing and nothing walks away, you can start feeling desparate. There just happens to be a cult-ure over there willing to take advantage of these people. Occupation could be a drag. There might be nothing a women can do about it. If I was a palistinian, "occupied" by israel, I would be more fed up with these cults than with the isrealies. You can reason with israelies. Suicidal koreshian jonestown loons... NEXT!
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