Palestinians find ready supply of suicide bombers

Gaza, April 30: PALESTINIAN suicide bombers evoke incomprehension as well as fear among many Israelis who find it hard to grasp the desperation and fervour that motivates them.

But for Palestinians in the teeming slums and refugee camps of Gaza, the question of why one of their compatriots would sacrifice his life to kill Israelis needs little soul-searching. ‘‘Why not?’’ would be a common response.

Islam forbids suicide, but rewards ‘‘martyrdom’’ as an instant ticket to glory in this world and paradise in the next. Muslim militant groups have no difficulty in convincing aspiring suicide bombers that they are guaranteed martyr status.

Abdallah al-Shami, a leader of the Islamic Jihad group, which has despatched several suicide bombers to Israel in the past, describes martyrdom as ‘‘a sacred worship of God’’ and a powerful tactic in the struggle against the Jewish state.

‘‘Martyrdom operations cost the Zionist enemy huge loss of life. You cannot achieve the same results by throwing stones or using a rifle,’’ he told Reuters, sitting on a couch in the group’s Gaza office, where an assault rifle lay on a chair.
In fact, the five suicide bombings perpetrated during the uprising that began last September have taken just five Israeli lives out of the 75 Israelis killed by Palestinians to date.

Islamic Jihad and the larger Hamas movement are viscerally opposed to Palestinian President Yasser Arafat’s policy of making peace with Israel, which they have sworn to destroy. Both groups have staged suicide bombings, often timed politically to upset progress in negotiations or to win popularity by avenging an Israeli strike on Palestinians.

Hamas has claimed four such attacks in Israel and Jerusalem since September and Islamic Jihad, one in the Gaza Stri Shami, careful to deny any links with Islamic Jihad’s military wing, defended suicide bombings as creating a ‘‘balance of terror’’ with Israel’s vastly more powerful military machine.

Muslim militant groups introduced the tactic, pioneered by the Iranian-backed Hizbollah group after Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, during the 1987-93 Palestinian uprising against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Hamas and Islamic Jihad used it to lethal effect in the seven years that followed the 1993 Oslo peace accords, killing about 111 Israelis and one US citizen in 24 suicide bombings.

Arafat had told his people that Oslo-based peacemaking, which the bombings were calculated to undermine, would lead to an independent state with east Jerusalem as its capital. A new revolt erupted last September when, amid a deadlock in peace talks, Ariel Sharon, now Israel’s Prime Minister, enraged Palestinians and Muslims around the world by visiting a compound in east Jerusalem containing sites holy to Muslims and Jews.

By that time, few Palestinians harboured hope that Sharon’s predecessor Ehud Barak would satisfy their minimum demands on borders, refugees and Jerusalem — even though most Israelis believe Barak’s offers were generous to a fault.

Many Palestinians say they see little to choose between life and death. A few go a step further and seek sponsors ready to strap sticks of dynamite to their waists. (REUTERS)