Word: palestinians
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...late March, a macabre music video appeared on a television show for Palestinian children. "Duha," 4, as pale as a porcelain doll, is sitting on a bed, watching her mom dress before leaving home. "Mommy, what are you carrying in your arms instead of me?" the girl sings. The next day, Duha gets the answer from the evening news. It turns out her mother was carrying explosives and had blown herself up, killing four Israelis. The final scene shows the girl wistfully rummaging through her dead mother's bedside table. She finds a hidden stick of dynamite and picks...
Abhorrent as such images might seem, the story behind them is even more wrenching. Aired on a TV channel run by the Islamic militants of Hamas, the two-minute re-enactment was based on the life of Reem Riyashi, 22, a Palestinian mother of two who blew herself up in a suicide attack against Israeli soldiers at a Gaza border crossing in January 2004. Riyashi is hailed as a courageous resistance fighter among Palestinians throughout Gaza and the West Bank, but the truth about what drove her to such a terrible act is much more complex. Palestinians in Gaza...
...Israeli counterterrorism officials, understanding the mind of a Palestinian woman suicide bomber has become an urgent priority. Since 2002, 88 Palestinian women have attempted suicide bombings, though just eight have been successful. Most were conducted during the height of the second Palestinian intifadeh, before Israelis launched a punishing war against terrorism and erected a security "fence" to separate themselves from the Palestinians. Since November 2006, Hamas, the ruling Palestinian party, has intermittently observed a "truce" with Israel. But on April 25, the militant wing of Hamas announced that it had abandoned the cease-fire. The militants oppose a move...
...likely that more Palestinian women will end up meeting the same fate as Reem Riyashi. Though there were just six suicide attacks against Israelis in 2006, two were carried out by women. "There's a growing involvement of Palestinian women in terrorism, everything from scouting targets and smuggling guns and explosives to becoming suicide bombers," says Anat Berko, an Israeli counterterrorism expert at the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Herzliya, who spent 13 years inside Israeli high-security prisons interviewing convicted terrorists. And yet it remains difficult to pinpoint why certain women turn to martyrdom. Behind the motives...
After years of study by Berko and other counterinsurgency experts, a profile of Palestinian women suicide bombers is emerging. Male suicide bombers tend to be introverts, the women less so. The women are older and better schooled than their male counterparts. Whereas the men are usually in their late teens and early 20s with scant education, studies carried out by Shin Bet, the Israeli version of the FBI, on 67 women recruited to become suicide bombers from 2002 to 2005 found that 33% were college graduates and an additional 39% had finished high school...