Palestinian Woman Bomber Bows Out of
Suicide Attack
30 MAY 2002
By Megan Goldin
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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 Fatah
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.
The existence of her child was all the evidence
the judge needed.
"We uphold your conviction of death by stoning as
prescribed by the Sharia" (Iislamic law).
An Islamic appeal court
has upheld a sentence of death by stoning for adultery against a
Nigerian woman.
Amina Lawal, 30, was found guilty by a court in Katsina state in
March after bearing a child outside marriage.
(BBC Aug. 19. 2002)
Link
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 war) should start a family and have
children," she told the newspaper.
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