The life surrounding 16-year-old suicide bomber

By DONALD MACINTYRE

From 16-year-old Hussam Abdu's house you can hear, as he must have done many times, the words of the Imam preaching at the Fatima Azara mosque 100m away.

At Friday prayers last week, two days after Hussam was caught and disarmed by Israeli soldiers of his suicide vest at the Hawara checkpoint at the edge of Nablus, the Imam's message of spiritual support for the armed Palestinian factions could hardly have been more uncompromising:

"The mujahedin will go to Paradise. I warn Muslims that their destiny is to die and that they have to work for the day of resurrection. God has ordered us to be patient and steadfast. God doesn't like people who accept humiliation. He doesn't like cowards and humiliated people. He likes mujahedin and courageous people ... "

If Hussam needed any reinforcement of his decision to confound the classmates who mocked him for being small or the teachers irritated by his truancy by becoming a martyr, he didn't have far to look.

Either way, effects of this much televised event, were still rippling outwards in Hussam's own neighbourhood of Makhfeya and beyond at the weekend.

The Israeli soldiers arrived at 4am on Thursday at the cramped flat where Tha'er Titi, a 15-year-old classmate of Hussam's since kindergarten days, lives with his parents and three siblings.

His mother Suhair told them her son was working with his father at a local bakery, as he did from 3.30 to 7am every morning before going to school.

The soldiers called his father, Isham, who drove Tha'er back in his white Peugeot; his son was arrested and taken away for questioning.

That afternoon Isham Titi had watched, flabbergasted, the TV pictures of Hussam being disarmed at Hawara. Had he not asked his son what he thought Hussam had been up to?

Well, he trusted his own son, whose routine was set: bakery, school, home in the afternoon for a short nap and in bed by 9pm.

Unlike Hussam, who had been absent for four weeks before last week's drama, Tha'er never missed class without permission.

But how would he react if Tha'er had been mixed up with what Hussam had been doing, or even if his son became a suicide bomber himself?

"I would not regret it if my son did it, because there is a lot of injustice against us by Israel. If I knew he was involved with Hussam, I would not be angry."

The willingness of some hard-working Palestinian parents like Isham, who love their children, to see them grow into suicide bombers is as familiar in the Middle East as it is incomprehensible to most Westerners.

Yet though his wife's family were refugees from a village near Jaffa which became Israeli after the war of 1948, Isham supports - in contrast to Hamas - a two-state solution on the basis of the pre-1967 borders. This, he is convinced would bring the lasting peace he insists he wants to see.

Nor, he says, has he any hatred of Jews.

"I used to work for a Jewish baker in Tel Aviv. He trusted me and I him. When he went to the war in 1973 and again in 1982 to Lebanon I looked after the bakery. I am sure if I saw him again we would still be friends."

But Isham had a conspiracy theory about the Hussam incident, one linked to the helicopter missile assassination in a Gaza street of Hamas founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, last Monday.

Had the Israeli premier, Yitzhak Rabin, not once warned Palestinians that the Israelis had an informer in every armed cell of four? Had the Israelis not themselves said they had known in advance that a suicide bombing was planned in Nablus?

"I think a collaborator with Israel made him [Hussam] do this. After the killing of Sheikh Yassin, they wanted to tell the world 'Palestinians are terrorists. Here is the evidence'."

By Friday, Hussam Abdu's mother, Tamam, was also floating the notion that the episode was masterminded by Israel.

But if it was the work of an armed faction cell, possibly of the Al Aqsa Brigades from the Balata refugee camp on the edge of the city, Tamam, 50, was blaming those behind her son's action for recruiting one so young, not for the strategy of suicide bombing.

If she had known about it, she would have stopped him but "because he is a child. He doesn't know what is best for him."

What did she think of the remarks attributed to her son in the Tel Aviv newspaper Yedioth Ahronot that he had wanted to go to Paradise?

"If someone lives in hell and he has a means of going to Paradise he will accept it," she answered

Before producing baby photographs of her youngest son, she said: "These children see the crimes of occupation. They have never enjoyed their childhood."

During the present intifada the family had had to leave their house in the middle of the night when Israeli troops came to search the area for weapons.

Amid shooting during Operation Defensive Shield, they had to flee upstairs when a gun turret smashed through the window of a downstairs room.

Did she not as a mother worry about children dying in suicide attacks?

"In our religion it is forbidden to kill innocent people. But they are killing our children. Until they stop it is an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth"

She added: "If they had not killed Sheikh Yassin, there might have been a chance for peace. But now there is not."

This may be an oversimplification. Most notably the assassination did not stop an April 14 Washington summit between Ariel Sharon and President George Bush finally being announced this week.

The talks, which will be preceded by White House meetings with President Mubarak of Egypt and King Abdullah of Jordan, come at a delicate stage.

Sharon is seeking to secure US endorsement for his plan to "disengage" from Gaza and from a limited number - as few as five - Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

Officials will make strenuous efforts to pave the way for this before the summit, but the US has been resisting Sharon's attempts to secure in return a guarantee that the US will let Israel annex Gush Etzion, Ariel, and Ma'ale Adumim, the three biggest settlements, as part of any final deal.

For the time being at least in Israel, preoccupation with the disengagement plan has all but superseded consideration of the floundering international "roadmap" to peace. Indeed, disengagement is the context in which Israeli politicians and commentators opened a vigorous and quite polarised debate over the wisdom or otherwise of assassinating Sheikh Yassin.

The reasons behind the assassination - which could have been done at any time in the past few months - are complex.

On one level it was a reaction to the suicide bombing in Ashdod eight days earlier, the first to be carried out by Palestinians from inside Gaza since the present intifada began 3 1/2 years ago.

On another, Ariel Sharon may have been trying to convince the hard right of his own Likud party that he is still on its side.

On yet another, he looks determined not to allow a disengagement to be claimed as a victory by whatever is left of the present Hamas leadership.

And finally he may just be seriously trying to do all he can to weaken Hamas and even allow a chance for a correspondingly strengthened Palestinian Authority leadership to take over.

This last proposition has sharply divided Israeli opinion. Though 60 per cent of Israelis surveyed in a Yedioth Ahronot poll last week approved of the killing, 47 per cent said it would make them more afraid of militant retaliation, against only 1 per cent who thought it would make them less so.

The newspaper advertisement published by more than 60 prominent Palestinian intellectuals last Thursday, bitterly condemning the killing but also effectively urging restraint, was itself a counter-reaction to the bloodcurdling response issued by Hamas after the assassination.

Many Israeli pundits believe that it will strengthen rather than weaken Hamas.

"I'm not a vegetarian about this," says Ron Pundak, who heads the Shimon Peres Centre for Peace, and says he can see the strong case for killing someone about to perpetrate a suicide attack. "But this looks like revenge for its own sake."

Against that, Ariel Sharon has been advised that Hamas's ability to strike against Israelis has been severely hampered by the relentless policy of targeted assassinations.

Although there are signs in Nablus that Hamas's bomb-making capacity may be increasing, the Shin Bet security service says that elsewhere on the West Bank, its ability to carry out attacks on its own is waning.

Professor Gerald Steinberg, of Bar Ilan university, says the long term effect of the assassination may be to reduce Hamas' hold on the population before a pullout from Gaza.

"You can argue whether this is going to succeed or not, but it's certainly not irrational," he says.

The big question remains whether disengagement from Gaza is an alternative rather than a step towards the final settlement envisaged in the much scorned roadmap.

Another question is whether Bush is willing in an election year to apply the kind of pressure on Sharon which might change his mind, and revive progress towards the peace deal that in their hearts a majority of Palestinians and Israelis still seem to want.

A few minutes' drive from the Abdu home, in Balata - where a seven-year-old boy was killed by a stray bullet during a firefight between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian militants yesterday - what was left of a beige Ford Fiesta lay on a secluded stretch of wasteland.

It turned out to have blown up - not as local rumour immediately had it, because of another missile assassination, but because a bomb being prepared by a local Al Aqsa Brigades militant had detonated accidentally while he sat in the driver's seat away from prying eyes during Friday prayers. Ayub Shahim, a former quarryman in his 50s whose bulldozer was badly damaged by the blast, surveyed the wrecked Ford in which a man was killed planning the destruction of many others. He sighed and said: "Life here is as worthless as a cigarette."

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