Mother chooses 'martyrdom'

By JUSTIN HUGGLER in Erez

In the video she left before she died, Reem al-Riashi said she had dreamed of becoming a "martyr", and that she wanted pieces of her body to fly like "deadly shrapnel".

Yesterday they were sponging up her body parts from the floor, indistinguishable from the pieces of flesh of the four other people Riashi murdered when she detonated her suicide bomb belt.

Riashi was only the second Palestinian mother to become a suicide bomber. She left behind two children: Mohammed, 3, and Doha, 2.

"God gave me two children and I loved them so much," she said in her videotaped suicide message. "Only God knew how much I loved them."

Riashi died just a day after Tom Hurndall, the unarmed British peace activist left in a coma for nine months after he was shot in the head by an Israeli soldier just a few kilometres south in the Gaza Strip last April.

He was 22, the same age as Riashi.

Hurndall died trying to rescue Palestinian children trapped in the line of fire.

Riashi died in order to kill and maim.

Her family disowned her for what she did.

"I condemn it," said her brother-in-law. "I support peace."

Some said they saw Riashi's husband sitting, crying. He had not known what she was going to do.

She talked her way past an Israeli security check at a border crossing out of the Gaza Strip, then set off her explosives about 9.30am local time, killing two Israeli soldiers, a member of the military-style border police, and an Israeli civilian.

Riashi had arrived to queue at the border crossing for Palestinian workers into an industrial complex on the Israeli side of the border.

About 3000 Palestinians cross to work in the complex every day.

Desperate for work, they have to queue for hours penned in like sheep in narrow spaces between metal bars.

It was Riashi's first time queuing here.

She claimed she had come to apply for an ID card with a magnetic strip, which would allow her to cross every day to work in the complex.

Riashi was faking a limp, and witnesses said one woman had helped her, believing she was disabled. Riashi thanked the stranger, then warned her to back away.

When she reached the front of the queue, Riashi told the Israeli soldiers manning the security check that she had a metal implant in her leg, which she feared would set off the metal detector, said Major Gadi Shamni, the Israeli Army brigade commander in Gaza.

Because she was a woman, the soldiers sent for a female soldier to check her by hand, and asked her to step inside and wait. Under her clothes, Riashi was wearing a vest packed with explosives, and once inside the room she set them off.

The room was packed: Israeli soldiers and security guards, and Palestinians waiting to cross. Seven were wounded, four of them Palestinians.

- INDEPENDENT