In Growing Numbers, Palestinian Boys Are Choosing the Brief Life of a 'Martyr'

June 10, 2002

By TRACY WILKINSON, TIMES STAFF WRITER

GAZA CITY -- The three 14-year-olds were ranked No. 1, 2 and 3 in their eighth-grade class. Smart boys, sharp. Ismail abu Nadi helped friends with their homework. He always knew the answers.

Ismail and his two classmates, Yusuf Zegout and Anwar Hamdouna, stole from their Gaza City homes one night this spring and crept toward a heavily fortified Jewish settlement nearby. The boys--armed with knives, a small homemade pipe bomb and a hoe to dig under the settlement's fence--were spotted from a distance by Israeli soldiers and shot dead.


Ismail and his friends were not alone. On that same late-April night, six other boys of similar age also set off to attack the Netzarim settlement. They were stopped by Palestinian police. And a few days earlier, a boy attempting to attack a different settlement was shot dead by Israeli soldiers, while a 14-year-old friend with him turned back at the last minute and was spared. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Palestinians have proclaimed their willingness to become "martyrs," to die in the pursuit of killing Israeli Jews. In a society increasingly supportive of suicide bombings and similar attacks, what these children did should not have been particularly surprising. Still, for a time, it gave pause.

Gazans condemned the boys' deeds. Hamas, a Gaza-based radical Islamic organization that normally extols the virtues of dying in the struggle against Israel, branded the acts as futile and banned boys from such missions, though it was doubtful the group took any action beyond its statement. It wasn't the attacks per se that angered Hamas leaders but the performance of them by boys too young to know what they were doing and how to do it effectively.

Ismail, Yusuf and Anwar left behind classmates at Salahudeen School in a middle-class Gaza City neighborhood who, at least publicly, professed horror at how the boys died.

"Maybe when we are old enough we can do these things, like when we are 20," said Riad Muhemar, 14. "Now we should be educating ourselves."

"I don't know why Ismail did this," added Saleh Haib, 15. "He never told me what he was going to do, and I would have told him not to do it if he had. It drove me crazy when I heard."

Fifteen-year-old Mohammed Bamer sat next to Ismail in class for the last three years. "Of course a martyr is something good, but it's not for us," Mohammed said. "Certainly he was under a lot of pressure. But if he had thought more about it, he wouldn't have done it."

Whatever revulsion was triggered in Gaza by the deaths of Ismail and his friends was short-lived. The bomber who blew himself up last month at a park in the Israeli city of Rishon Le Zion, killing two Israelis, was reported to have been 16. Another 16-year-old was stopped by Israeli soldiers at a roadblock in the West Bank a couple of days later and was found to be wearing a belt of explosives.

Palestinians are volunteering at an increasing rate to serve as suicide bombers or to carry out other deadly attacks against Israelis. The groundswell is fed by outrage over what Palestinians see as Israeli atrocities against Palestinian civilians, by the grinding frustration over torturous roadblocks and checkpoints erected by Israeli forces to impede Palestinian attacks, and by despair over the future. A person who dies in an act of "resistance" is assured a place in heaven, as is his or her family, many Palestinians believe. And that's not to mention economic benefits paid to survivors.

Gazan psychiatrist Eyad Sarraj, however, believes that another phenomenon is giving rise to the increase: society's glorification of the "martyr," the person who dies fighting Israel, be it in a simple act of throwing a stone or in detonating a bomb in a crowded discotheque.

With martyrdom, said Sarraj, come status, societal approval and power. And nowhere is that equation more oversimplified than for the young.

"We have here a cultural glorification of martyrs in the eyes of children," Sarraj said. "If you asked children 20 years ago what they wanted to be when they grew up, they'd say a doctor or an engineer. Now they say they want to be a martyr."

Celebration of Martyrs

Martyrs are given status unparalleled in Palestinian society, Sarraj noted. Their pictures are plastered on public walls, their funerals are emotional celebrations, their families often receive visits from state officials. They become almost holy, praised by imams at mosques or over loudspeakers at rallies, where children are often dressed as shrouded dead or as pint-sized suicide bombers. A game called shahid, or martyr, is popular among Gazan children. Many teens have become experts in crafting homemade pipe bombs using elbow-shaped pieces of plumbing.

Many Palestinian children also receive rudimentary weapons training at summer camps sponsored by Hamas or mainstream Palestinian organizations. It was unclear whether Ismail and his classmates received such training, though their crude weapons were easy to obtain or assemble from household goods.

"A child likes to identify with heroes, heroes who commit heroic acts, heroes who represent power," Sarraj said. "The martyr is fitting that model for the child."

Sarraj, whose iconoclastic views often get him in trouble with Palestinian authorities, does not discount other motivations for the child who undertakes a suicide mission: hatred and the desire for revenge; an opinion, reinforced in Islamic teachings, of death not as an end but as a passage to a better life.

Most Palestinian children have had to watch their fathers humiliated at checkpoints by Israeli soldiers, or have heard the tales of their uncles' time in Israeli prisons. In Ismail's class of about 35 boys, 15 raise their hands when asked if a close relative has been killed in the current 20-month-old uprising, or the earlier intifada that lasted six years and ended in 1993.

But Sarraj sees the child's quest for approval in a culture that values martyrdom as the overriding motivation, and a phenomenon with potentially disastrous consequences for Palestinian society in the long run.

Ahmed Nasser, a veteran Gaza-based activist in the Fatah movement of Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, was alarmed to learn recently that his 11-year-old son was going around telling people he wanted to become a martyr.

"My associates were saying to him, so, you'll grow up to be a Fatah leader like your father," Nasser recalled in his Gaza City office. "And he said, no, I want to be a martyr. It's the quickest way to fight for Palestine."

'He Is Still a Child'

Nasser blames the entire environment, from the military actions of Israel to the endless, violent images on Palestinian television.

"There are a lot of events stamped in his head that make him think this way," Nasser said of the boy. "I tried to convince him that he is still a child, that he should wait until he understands the whole picture. And then when he is old enough he can decide for himself. But a child cannot make these decisions."

Um Nidal Farahat, a Gazan mother of four, has a very different attitude. She says she encouraged her sons, from a young age, to attack Israeli targets and become martyrs.

One son, Mohammed, 17, was killed in March when he attacked Atzmona, a Jewish settlement in the southern Gaza Strip, and killed five youths there. Mohammed had been active with Hamas' military wing since he was 7, Um Nidal told the Saudi newspaper Asharq al Awsat last month.

"In this atmosphere, Mohammed came to love martyrdom," she said. "As a mother, I re-enforced this love for martyrdom in the mind of Mohammed and of all my sons."

She said she discussed the Atzmona operation with Mohammed before he embarked on it and posed with him for keepsake photos.

According to Israeli researchers, the average age of the suicide bomber has declined slightly from 22 in the 1990s to about 20 or 21 now.

Bassem Wahidi, the headmaster at Salahudeen School, said he and the staff will call the police, and then a boy's parents, if they learn that the boy is planning a suicide attack.

"You can't blame them for doing this, what with everything they see on TV, but we oppose it because they have a future," Wahidi said. "They can be a doctor, an engineer, a soldier to kill Israelis. But at this age they should be educating themselves."

Ismail's father, Mohammed abu Nadi, a 47-year-old civil engineer, cannot see beyond blaming Israel and its policies for his son's decision.

Ismail, he recalled, was an extremely bright child who spoke English and wanted to be an engineer and earn a doctorate. Ismail's bedroom in the large apartment he shared with his parents and four siblings is well-stocked with a computer, photo scanner and printer.

"I wanted to take my heart from my body when I learned the news, because he is more valuable than I am," Abu Nadi said. "On the other hand, he chose his way, to be a martyr and go to paradise."

The father said the son grew especially angry when the family attempted weekly visits to Ismail's grandfather in the town of Mughazi, several miles south of Gaza City. Palestinians traveling Gaza's main north-south road are often forced to wait for hours while a single settler, or an army patrol, passes on the east-west road that cuts across the Gaza Strip to the Jewish settlement of Netzarim.

"He often said he wanted to remove that settlement, and he asked why it had to be there," Abu Nadi said.

Ismail, like his two companions, left behind a letter for his parents. He asked that Hamas "adopt" him in death and supervise the mourning over him, and he urged his brothers to obey the rules of Islam.

"Mom, Dad," Ismail wrote. "Those are the two words that a child speaks when he starts his life, and so I say them now. I want you to be happy with me. After I die in this operation, do not be sad, because I will be a martyr, God willing. Your son, Ismail."