Lethal conviction

Profile: Reem Al-Reyashi this week achieved her ambition to be a 'martyr', killing four Israelis and herself in Gaza, where '…

Profile: Reem Al-Reyashi this week achieved her ambition to be a 'martyr', killing four Israelis and herself in Gaza, where 'everything is abnormal, so our thinking too will be abnormal'. Nuala Haughey reports from Gaza

In life, Reem Al-Reyashi combined the roles of wife and mother of two young children with that of aspiring "martyr". In death, the 22-year-old Palestinian suicide bomber who killed four Israelis in the Gaza Strip this week achieved her personal glory, fulfilling her desire to turn her body into "deadly shrapnel against Zionists".

Hours after the attack, while the painstaking job of collecting the scattered pieces of her victims' charred flesh was still going on, fresh graffiti honouring Al-Reyashi's "martyrdom" had already appeared on the walls of her native Gaza City.

Al-Reyashi became the first female suicide bomber to come from Gaza, as well as the first to be used by the Islamic militant group, Hamas, a fundamentalist and deeply conservative organisation which in the past has balked at the prospect of women swapping their traditional caring role for that of jihadi.

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A handful of Palestinian women, all aged in their late teens or 20s, have perpetrated suicide-bomb attacks during the three years of the current intifada, or uprising. However, they were all allied to smaller groups, principally the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an offshoot of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction, which declared joint responsibility with Hamas for Al-Reyashi's attack.

Locals in Gaza say the 22-year-old came from a wealthy merchant family which was not religious. One resident said he had heard that the high school graduate had asked Hamas many times to send her on a suicide mission, and had even threatened to do it alone.

Her fervour was evident in her videotaped farewell message, released posthumously, as is customary. Seated in front of a Hamas flag in the distinctive green of Islam, wearing combat fatigues with the traditional black head-covering and clutching an assault rifle, she declared her love for her children, an 18-month-old daughter, Doha, and her three-and-a-half-year-old son, Obedia.

"God gave me two children and I loved them so much. Only God knew how much I loved them," she said in the video, asking that her children study in religious schools.

Smiling, she said she "always wanted to be the first woman to carry out a martyr attack, where parts of my body can fly all over. That is the only wish I can ask God for." In death, Al-Reyashi's flesh and blood mingled with that of her enemies, four Israeli males, all about her own age, who died with her at around 9.30 a.m. on Wednesday in an industrial zone at the northern edge of the Gaza Strip. Three of the victims were paramilitary border policemen, while the fourth was a security guard.

The attack took place at a busy terminal where Palestinian labourers must pass through Israeli security checks before entering the Erez Industrial Estate, a dreary concrete zone where around 4,000 Palestinians work amid artificial palm trees painted in garish green and yellow.

While the zone lies within the borders of the Gaza Strip, which is under nominal Palestinian control, since 1993 Palestinians have needed permits from Israel to work there. Al-Reyashi drove from Gaza in a taxi with two other Palestinians and made her way to the terminal building at the entrance to the industrial estate, where she triggered an alarm from the walk-through metal detector.

The Israeli army said she feigned a leg injury, telling the soldier on duty that she had metal plates in her leg which had set off the detector. The soldier asked her to wait for a female soldier to arrive and carry out a body-check, then allowed her to step inside the terminal, where she blew herself up.

Liz Hadida, the soldier summoned to search Reyashi, was wounded in the blast. She told Israeli reporters from her hospital bed that Reyashi did not act suspiciously.

Locals said she had made seven practice dummy-runs to Erez prior to the suicide bombing, reaching the first area of Israeli security processing before withdrawing.

The Israeli army denounced the attack as a "very cruel and cynical" exploitation of the humanitarian consideration shown to Al-Reyashi by the soldiers. Men are made to lift their clothes to ensure they are not wearing suicide-bomb belts, but this would be deeply offensive to Muslim women.

However, for many Palestinians such an audacious attack against an Israeli military target is a legitimate act of resistance against occupation. While Israel has accused militant groups of glorifying suicide bombers, and international human rights organisations have called the bombings crimes against humanity, Palestinians say Israel's military crackdowns provoke such violence. Over the past 39 months of the current intifada, 2,618 people have been killed on the Palestinian side and 909 on the Israeli side.

Within hours of Al-Reyashi's death, mourners gathered beneath the green awning of a funeral tent erected by Hamas at a mosque near her home for the customary three-day mourning period.

Skinny little boys in open-toed sandals ran around excitedly in the rain-soaked mud waving small Hamas flags while adults gathered in the rows of plastic chairs under the awning to pay their respects to Al-Reyashi's relatives.

However, in a departure from usual practice, neither her husband nor her parents were there. A relative said the family had not known of her plans.

By the afternoon of the attack her parents' home was vacated. Locals said they feared that Israel would demolish their premises, a common response by the Israeli army to such suicide attacks.

A Hamas member at the funeral tent, who called himself Abu Jihad (22), said he knew the woman's family and she used to visit the venue where men studied the Koran.

"Really, I am jealous of her. I hope and I wish to be in her place some day," he said. "When they found that this girl was ready and strong to blow herself up for God, then the military wing [of Hamas] decided she could go. It was difficult to get to where she was and a woman could get there but a man couldn't."

Around 1.2 million stateless Palestinians, most of them refugees, live in Gaza, a tiny enclave on the eastern Mediterranean coastal plain. The narrow stretch of land is completely fenced off from Israel, which Palestinians require a permit from the Israeli authorities to enter. Unemployment runs at about 60 per cent and the place teems with poverty and squalor as well as a unique vibrancy.

In the wake of Al-Reyashi's attack, the Israelis indefinitely sealed the Strip to review security at its border crossings, preventing some 20,000 Palestinian workers from getting to their jobs in Erez and in Israel, where many work in construction. Israel terms such moves a necessary security measure to save lives; people in Gaza call it collective punishment for the action of extremists.

Ghazi Hamad, the editor of the weekly Al-Resala Islamist newspaper in the Strip, says the despair and suffering of people during the current intifada has made it easier to recruit suicide bombers.

"Before the \ intifada, it was difficult to recruit people here, but now it is easy. Here everything is abnormal. We cannot sleep. We cannot live or teach our children. Everything is abnormal, so our thinking too will also be abnormal," he said.

The use of suicide attacks by Palestinian militants dates back to the early 1990s, but has increased in intensity during the current intifada. They are a devastating human weapon against the military might of Israel.

Supporters of such methods argue that Israeli society is deeply militaristic in nature, with both men and women doing mandatory military service. In other words, there are no civilians in Israel.

It was the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade which introduced the use of women bombers, who are less likely to arouse the suspicions of the Israelis than men. During the past three years suicide bombers were responsible for 50 per cent of Israeli fatalities.

Whether it was political conviction, religious fervour, despair, mental illness, evil or the search for an identity in an oppressive environment which drove Al-Reyashi to turn herself into a walking bomb remains unclear.

Her family kept a low profile at her funeral on Thursday in the Sheikh Ajlin neighbourhood of Gaza City, attended by thousands. This contrasts with other funerals for suicide attackers, at which mourners praise relatives for the death of the "shahid" or martyr. Masked gunmen from Hamas and Al Aqsa carried Al-Reyashi's coffin, draped in the Hamas green flag.

"It is not enough to call her a hero," said a Hamas leader, Mahmoud Zahar, in the eulogy. "Calling her a hero does not give the whole truth. This woman abandoned her husband and children to win paradise."

Meanwhile, while Hamas pledged that Al-Reyashi would not be the last female suicide bomber, Israel said it planned to resume targeted killings of senior Hamas members. This means people in Gaza will soon hear the familiar sound of missiles being launched by air force helicopters.