An Arsenal of Believers

by Nasra Hassan
Talking to the "human bombs."
June 11, 2001
http://www.newyorker.com

Just before midnight on June 30, 1993, three members of the 
Palestinian fundamentalist group Hamas sat in their hideout, 
a cave in the hills near Hebron, and began reciting from 
the Koran. At dawn, when the men heard the morning call to 
prayer from a mosque in the village below, they knelt and 
uttered the traditional invocation to Allah that Muslim 
warriors make before setting off for combat. They put on 
clean clothes, tucked the Koran into their pockets, and began 
the long hike over the hills and along dry riverbeds to the 
outskirts of Jerusalem. In the Palestinian neighborhoods of 
East Jerusalem, they walked in silence so that their accents, 
the guttural vernacular of Gaza, would not arouse suspicion. 
Along the way, they stopped to pray at every mosque. At dusk, 
they boarded a bus that was heading toward West Jerusalem, 
filled with Israeli passengers. When the driver thwarted their 
attempt to hijack the vehicle, they tried to detonate the 
homemade bombs they were carrying. The bombs failed to go off, 
so they pulled out guns and began firing wildly. The shots 
injured five passengers, including a woman who later died. 
The young men fled the bus, hijacked a car at a red light, 
and forced the driver to take them toward Bethlehem. Israeli 
security forces stopped them at a military checkpoint, and in 
a shootout two of the young men and their hostage were killed. 
The third hijacker, whom I will call S., was struck by a bullet 
in the head; he lay comatose for two months in Israeli hospitals. 
Finally, he was pronounced brain-dead, and the Israelis sent him 
back to his family in the Gaza Strip to die. But S. recovered, 
and when we met, five years later, he told me his version of 
the events. By then, he was married and the father of three sons. 
Each of them had been named for shaheed batal—"martyr heroes."

In Gaza, S. is celebrated as a young man who "gave his life to 
Allah" and whom Allah "brought back to life." He was polite as 
he welcomed me into his home. The house was surrounded by a high 
cement wall that had been fortified with steel. We sat down in a 
large, simply furnished room whose walls were inscribed with 
verses from the Koran. On one wall was a poster that showed green 
birds flying in a purple sky, a symbol of the Palestinian suicide 
bombers.

S. had recently turned twenty-seven. He is of slight build, and he 
walked with a limp, the only trace of his near-death. He invited 
his wife to join us, and he answered my questions without hesitation.

I asked him when, and why, he had decided to volunteer for martyrdom. 
"In the spring of 1993, I began to pester our military leaders to 
let me do an operation," he said. "It was around the time of the 
Oslo accords, and it was quiet, too quiet. I wanted to do an 
operation that would incite others to do the same. Finally, I was 
given the green light to leave Gaza for an operation inside Israel."

"How did you feel when you heard that you'd been selected for 
martyrdom?" I asked.

"It's as if a very high, impenetrable wall separated you from 
Paradise or Hell," he said. "Allah has promised one or the other 
to his creatures. So, by pressing the detonator, you can immediately 
open the door to Paradise—it is the shortest path to Heaven."

S. was one of eleven children in a middle-class family that, 
in 1948, had been forced to flee from Majdal to a refugee camp in 
Gaza, during the Arab- Israeli war that started with the creation 
of the State of Israel. He joined Hamas in his early teens and 
became a street activist. In 1989, he served two terms in Israeli 
prisons for intifada activity, including attacks on Israeli 
soldiers. One of his brothers is serving a life sentence in Israel.

I asked S. to describe his preparations for the suicide mission. 
"We were in a constant state of worship," he said. "We told each 
other that if the Israelis only knew how joyful we were they 
would whip us to death! Those were the happiest days of my life."

"What is the attraction of martyrdom?" I asked.

"The power of the spirit pulls us upward, while the power of 
material things pulls us downward," he said. "Someone bent on 
martyrdom becomes immune to the material pull. Our planner asked, 
'What if the operation fails?' We told him, 'In any case, we get 
to meet the Prophet and his companions, inshallah.' We were 
floating, swimming, in the feeling that we were about to enter 
eternity. We had no doubts. We made an oath on the Koran, in the 
presence of Allah—a pledge not to waver. This jihad pledge is 
called bayt al ridwan, after the garden in Paradise that is 
reserved for the prophets and the martyrs. I know that there 
are other ways to do jihad. But this one is sweet—the sweetest. 
All martyrdom operations, if done for Allah's sake, hurt less 
than a gnat's bite!"

S. showed me a video that documented the final planning for the 
operation. In the grainy footage, I saw him and two other young 
men engaging in a ritualistic dialogue of questions and answers 
about the glory of martyrdom. S., who was holding a gun, identified 
himself as a member of al-Qassam, the military wing of Hamas, 
which is one of two Palestinian Islamist organizations that 
sponsor suicide bombings. (Islamic Jihad is the other group.) 
"Tomorrow, we will be martyrs," he declared, looking straight at 
the camera. "Only the believers know what this means. I love 
martyrdom." The young men and the planner then knelt and placed 
their right hands on the Koran. The planner said, "Are you ready? 
Tomorrow, you will be in Paradise."

Since 1982, I have been an international relief worker, and after 
1987 my job brought me regularly to the Middle East, especially 
to the Palestinian territories. In 1996, I was posted in the 
Gaza Strip during one of the most vicious cycles of suicide 
bombings. To understand why certain young men voluntarily blow 
themselves up in the name of Islam, I began, without official 
sponsorship, to research their backgrounds and the beliefs that 
had led them to such extreme tactics.

Finding people who were willing to discuss the details of these 
activities was no easy task. I was warned that my interest in 
trying to understand the suicide missions was dangerous. One day, 
I stopped to buy fruit at a roadside stand in the south of the 
Gaza Strip. When I asked where the mangoes had come from, the 
vender smiled and said, "From Beit Lid, Hadera, and Afula" - 
three Israeli towns that had been attacked by suicide bombers. 
Eventually, when the people who were observing me had assured 
themselves of my credentials—an important one was that I am 
Muslim and from Pakistan—I was allowed to meet with members of 
Hamas and Islamic Jihad who could help me in my research. 
"We are agreeing to talk to you so that you can explain the 
Islamic context of these operations," one man told me. "Even 
many in the Islamic world do not understand." Our meetings, 
which were arranged by intermediaries of all kinds, took place 
late at night, in back rooms, in small local cafes, on the 
sewage-strewn Gaza beach, or in prison cells. I would drive to 
a rendezvous point to pick up a contact, who then guided me to 
a meeting by way of a circuitous, untraceable route. From 1996 
to 1999, I interviewed nearly two hundred and fifty people 
involved in the most militant camps of the Palestinian cause: 
volunteers who, like S., had been unable to complete their 
suicide missions, the families of dead bombers, and the men who 
trained them.

None of the suicide bombers—they ranged in age from eighteen to 
thirty-eight—conformed to the typical profile of the suicidal 
personality. None of them were uneducated, desperately poor, 
simple-minded, or depressed. Many were middle class and, unless 
they were fugitives, held paying jobs. More than half of them 
were refugees from what is now Israel. Two were the sons of 
millionaires. They all seemed to be entirely normal members of 
their families. They were polite and serious, and in their 
communities they were considered to be model youths. Most were 
bearded. All were deeply religious. They used Islamic 
terminology to express their views, but they were well informed 
about politics in Israel and throughout the Arab world. I was 
told that in order to be accepted for a suicide mission the 
volunteers had to be convinced of the religious legitimacy of 
the acts they were contemplating, as sanctioned by the divinely 
revealed religion of Islam. Many of these young men had memorized 
large sections of the Koran and were well versed in the finer 
points of Islamic law and practice. But their knowledge of 
Christianity was rooted in the medieval Crusades, and they 
regarded Judaism and Zionism as synonymous. When they spoke, 
they all tended to use the same phrases: "The West is afraid of 
Islam." "Allah has promised us ultimate success." "It is in the 
Koran." "Islamic Palestine will be liberated." And they all 
exhibited an unequivocal rage toward Israel. Over and over, 
I heard them say, "The Israelis humiliate us. They occupy our 
land, and deny our history."

Most of the men I interviewed requested strict anonymity; they 
insisted that not even their initials be noted. "With just a 
small detail like that, the security services could identify me," 
one said. Some of them were masked and met me in dark rooms or 
parked cars at night so that I couldn't see their faces. The 
majority spoke in Arabic, and they all talked matter-of-factly 
about the bombings, showing an unshakable conviction in the 
rightness of their cause and their methods. When I asked them 
if they had any qualms about killing innocent civilians, they 
would immediately respond, "The Israelis kill our children and 
our women. This is war, and innocent people get hurt."

They were not inclined to argue, but they were happy to discuss, 
far into the night, the issues and the purpose of their activities. 
One condition of the interviews was that, in our discussions, 
I not refer to their deeds as "suicide," which is forbidden in 
Islam. (Their preferred term is "sacred explosions.") One member 
of al-Qassam said, "We do not have tanks or rockets, but we have 
something superior—our exploding Islamic human bombs. In place 
of a nuclear arsenal, we are proud of our arsenal of believers."

The first suicide bombing by an Islamist Palestinian group took 
place in the West Bank in April, 1993; the latest was in October, 
2001. Between 1993 and 1998, thirty-seven human bombs exploded; 
twenty-four were identified as the work of Hamas, thirteen as 
that of Islamic Jihad. Since the eruption of the second intifada, 
in September, 2000, twenty-six human bombs have exploded. Hamas 
claims responsibility for nineteen of them; Islamic Jihad claims 
seven. To date, an estimated two hundred and fifteen Israelis 
have been killed in these explosions, and some eighteen hundred 
have been injured. The attacks have taken place in shopping malls, 
on buses, at street corners, in cafes - wherever people congregate. 
Hamas and Islamic Jihad consider suicide bombings a military 
response to what they regard as Israeli provocations. But there 
is a clear correlation between the peace process and cycles of 
suicide attacks designed to block progress. Whenever I broached 
the issue, however, the Islamists denied that there was any such 
link.

Before September 11th, Islamist fundamentalist groups had sponsored 
human bombings not only in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and 
Israel but also in Afghanistan, Algeria, Argentina, Chechnya, 
Croatia, Kashmir, Kenya, Kuwait, Lebanon, Pakistan, Panama, 
Tajikistan, Tanzania, and Yemen. The targets have ranged from 
ordinary people to world leaders, including the Pope, who was to 
have been assassinated in Manila in 1995. Dressed as a priest, 
the assassin presumably planned to detonate himself as he kissed 
the Pontiff's ring.

In 1988, Dr. Fathi Shiqaqi, a founder of the Palestinian Islamic 
Jihad, whose assassination, in 1995, was attributed to Mossad, 
Israel's secret service, wrote a document in which he laid out 
the importance of penetrating enemy territory and set down 
guidelines for the use of explosives in martyrdom operations. 
These rules were aimed at countering religious objections to 
the truck bombings that had become almost routine in Lebanon in 
the nineteen-eighties. Shiqaqi encouraged what he called 
"exceptional" martyrdom as a necessary tactic in jihad fi 
sabeel Allah (striving in the cause of Allah): "We cannot 
achieve the goal of these operations if our mujahid" - holy 
warrior - "is not able to create an explosion within seconds 
and is unable to prevent the enemy from blocking the operation. 
All these results can be achieved through the explosion, which 
forces the mujahid not to waver, not to escape; to execute a 
successful operation for religion and jihad; and to destroy the 
morale of the enemy and plant terror into the people." This 
capability, he said, is "a gift from Allah."

Yahya Ayyash, an engineering student in the West Bank who became 
a master bomb-maker, was the first to propose that human bombs 
be adopted in Hamas's military operations. (The late Israeli 
Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin dubbed Ayyash "the Engineer," 
which became his nickname in the Palestinian streets.) In a 
letter written in the early nineties to the Hamas leadership, 
Ayyash recommended the use of human bombs as the most painful 
way to inflict damage on the Israeli occupation forces. 
According to a source in Hamas, Ayyash said, "We paid a high 
price when we used only slingshots and stones. We need to exert 
more pressure, make the cost of the occupation that much more 
expensive in human lives, that much more unbearable." 
The assassination of Ayyash, in January, 1996, which is widely 
believed to have been the work of Israeli security forces, 
set off a wave of retaliatory suicide bombings.

My contacts told me that, as a military objective, spreading 
fear among the Israelis was as important as killing them. 
Anwar Aziz, an Islamic Jihad member who blew himself up in an 
ambulance in Gaza, in December, 1993, had often told friends, 
"Battles for Islam are won not through the gun but by striking 
fear into the enemy's heart." Another Islamist military leader 
said, "If our wives and children are not safe from Israeli 
tanks and rockets, theirs will not be safe from our human bombs."

Military commanders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad remarked that the 
human bomb was one of the surest ways of hitting a target. 
A senior Hamas leader said, "The main thing is to guarantee that 
a large number of the enemy will be affected. With an explosive 
belt or bag, the bomber has control over vision, location, and 
timing."

As today's weapons of mass destruction go, the human bomb is 
cheap. A Palestinian security official pointed out that, apart 
from a willing young man, all that is needed is such items as 
nails, gunpowder, a battery, a light switch and a short cable, 
mercury (readily obtainable from thermometers), acetone, and 
the cost of tailoring a belt wide enough to hold six or eight 
pockets of explosives. The most expensive item is transportation 
to a distant Israeli town. The total cost of a typical operation 
is about a hundred and fifty dollars. The sponsoring organization 
usually gives between three thousand and five thousand dollars 
to the bomber's family.

In Palestinian neighborhoods, the suicide bombers' green birds 
appear on posters, and in graffiti - the language of the street. 
Calendars are illustrated with the "martyr of the month." 
Paintings glorify the dead bombers in Paradise, triumphant 
beneath a flock of green birds. This symbol is based on a saying 
of the Prophet Muhammad that the soul of a martyr is carried to 
Allah in the bosom of the green birds of Paradise. Children who 
cannot read chant the names of the heroes, and make the Islamist 
sign for victory - right fist with raised forefinger - as they 
play in narrow alleys. A biography of a martyr named Muawiyya 
Ruqa, who exploded a rigged donkey cart near a Jewish settlement 
in the Gaza Strip in June, 1995, tells of how his soul was borne 
upward on a fragment of the bomb.

In April, 1999, I met with an Imam affiliated with Hamas, 
a youthful, bearded graduate of the prestigious al Azhar 
University, in Cairo. He explained that the first drop of blood 
shed by a martyr during jihad washes away his sins instantaneously. 
On the Day of Judgment, he will face no reckoning. On the Day of 
Resurrection, he can intercede for seventy of his nearest and 
dearest to enter Heaven; and he will have at his disposal 
seventy-two houris, the beautiful virgins of Paradise. The Imam 
took pains to explain that the promised bliss is not sensual.

Sheikh Ahmed Yassin is the spiritual leader of Hamas. He was 
released from an Israeli prison in 1997, and during the next 
two years I had many meetings with him, in his small house on 
an unpaved lane in a crowded quarter of Gaza. He cautioned that 
I would find it hard to make martyrdom comprehensible to Western 
readers. "I doubt that they will be willing to understand your 
explanations," he said. "Love of martyrdom is something deep 
inside the heart. But these rewards are not in themselves the 
goal of the martyr. The only aim is to win Allah's satisfaction. 
That can be done in the simplest and speediest manner by dying 
in the cause of Allah. And it is Allah who selects the martyrs."

There is no shortage of willing recruits for martyrdom. 
"Our biggest problem is the hordes of young men who beat on our 
doors, clamoring to be sent," a Hamas leader told me. "It is 
difficult to select only a few. Those whom we turn away return 
again and again, pestering us, pleading to be accepted."

A senior member of al-Qassam said, "The selection process is 
complicated by the fact that so many wish to embark on this 
journey of honor. When one is selected, countless others are 
disappointed. They must learn patience and wait until Allah 
calls them." He told me that there had been many attempts on his 
life, and he made sure that we always met at a different time 
and in a different place. He wore a scarf over his face; 
only at our last meeting, when he was saying goodbye, did he 
remove it. "After every massacre, every massive violation of 
our rights and defilement of our holy places, it is easy for us 
to sweep the streets for boys who want to do a martyrdom 
operation," he said. "Fending off the crowds who demand revenge 
and retaliation and insist on a human bombing operation - that 
becomes our biggest problem!"

Hamas and Islamic Jihad recruit youths for potential leadership 
positions in the organizations, but their military wings rely 
on volunteers for martyrdom operations. They generally reject 
those who are under eighteen, who are the sole wage earners in 
their families, or who are married and have family responsibilities. 
If two brothers ask to join, one is turned away. The planner 
keeps a close eye on the volunteer's self-discipline, noting 
whether he can be discreet among friends and observing his 
piety in the mosque. (A cleric will sometimes recommend a notably 
zealous youth for martyrdom.) During the week before the operation, 
two "assistants" are delegated to stay with the potential martyr 
at all times. They report any signs of doubt, and if the young 
man seems to waver, a senior trainer will arrive to bolster his 
resolve. The father of Anwar Sukkar, who, with his friend Salah 
Shakir, carried out an explosion in Beit Lid in 1995, told me 
with pride, "Even after Salah saw my son ripped to shreds, 
he did not flinch. He waited before exploding himself, in order 
to cause additional deaths."

A planner for Islamic Jihad said that his organization carefully 
scrutinizes the motives of a potential bomber: "We ask this young 
man, and we ask ourselves, why he wishes so badly to become a 
human bomb. What are his real motives? Our questions are aimed 
at clarifying first and foremost for the boy himself his real 
reasons and the strength of his commitment. Even if he is a 
longtime member of our group and has always wanted to become a 
martyr, he needs to be very clear that in such an operation 
there is no drawing back. Preparation bolsters his conviction, 
which supports his certitude. It removes fear."

A member of Hamas explained the preparation: "We focus his 
attention on Paradise, on being in the presence of Allah, 
on meeting the Prophet Muhammad, on interceding for his loved 
ones so that they, too, can be saved from the agonies of Hell, 
on the houris, and on fighting the Israeli occupation and 
removing it from the Islamic trust that is Palestine." 
(A volunteer whom the Palestinian Authority arrested before 
he could carry out a suicide bombing offered this description 
of the immediacy of Paradise: "It is very, very near - right in 
front of our eyes. It lies beneath the thumb. On the other side 
of the detonator.")

One of the "technical considerations" that may be taken into 
account in the final selection of a candidate for martyrdom is 
the ability to pass, at least temporarily, as an Israeli Jew. 
In Islamic Jihad's first human-bomb operation, in September, 
1993, the martyr Ala'a al Kahlout shaved his beard, donned a 
cap and dark glasses, and dressed in shorts and a T-shirt before 
carrying his bomb onto a bus in Ashdod.

I asked one planner about the problem of fear. "The boy has left 
that stage far behind," he said. "The fear is not for his own 
safety or for his impending death. It does not come from lack of 
confidence in his ability to press the trigger. It is awe, 
produced by the situation. He has never done this before and, 
inshallah, will never do it again! It comes from his fervent 
desire for success, which will propel him into the presence of 
Allah. It is anxiety over the possibility of something going 
wrong and denying him his heart's wish. The outcome, remember, 
lies in Allah's hands."

I was told the story of a young Palestinian, M., by two men who, 
at different times, had been his cellmates in Israeli prisons. 
In September, 1993, in a safe house just outside Jerusalem, 
M. had performed ritual ablution, said his prayers, and set off 
on his bombing mission. He had boarded a bus - one on the same 
route on which S.'s bomb had failed to explode two months earlier. 
All he had to do was unzip his bag of explosives and press the 
detonator. "But at the moment he was to press the button he 
forgot Paradise," one of his former cellmates recalled. "He felt 
a split second of fear, a slight hesitation. To bolster himself, 
he recited from the Koran. Refreshed and strengthened, he again 
began to think of Paradise. When he felt ready, he tried again. 
But the detonator did not function. He prayed to himself, 
'Please, Allah, let me succeed.' But still it did not work, 
not even the third time, when he kept his finger pressed firmly 
on the knob. Recognizing that there was a technical problem, 
he got off the bus at the next stop, returned the bag to the 
planner, and went home." (The Israeli security services 
subsequently arrested M. in another attack, and he is currently 
in prison.)

Many of the volunteers and the members of their family told 
stories of persecution, including beatings and torture, suffered 
at the hands of Israeli forces. I asked whether some of the 
bombers acted from feelings of personal revenge. "No," a trainer 
told me. "If that alone motivates the candidate, his martyrdom 
will not be acceptable to Allah. It is a military response, 
not an individual's bitterness, that drives an operation. 
Honor and dignity are very important in our culture. And when 
we are humiliated we respond with wrath."

Al khaliyya al istishhadiyya, which is often mistranslated as 
"suicide cell" - its proper translation is "martyrdom cell" - 
is the basic building block of operations. Generally, each cell 
consists of a leader and two or three young men. When a candidate 
is placed in a cell, usually after months, if not years, of 
religious studies, he is assigned the lofty title of al shaheed 
al hayy, "the living martyr." He is also referred to as "he who 
is waiting for martyrdom." A young man named Ayman Juma Radi, 
whose self-explosion, in December, 1994, was delayed by a few 
days, wrote a message in his diary, in which he glumly signed 
himself "the deferred martyr."

Each cell is tightly compartmentalized and secret. Cell members 
do not discuss their affiliation with their friends or family, 
and even if two of them know each other in normal life, they are 
not aware of the other's membership in the same cell. (Only the 
leader is known to both.) Each cell, which is dissolved after 
the operation has been completed, is given a name from the Koran 
or from Islamic history.

In most cases, the young men undergo intensified spiritual 
exercises, including prayers and recitations of the Koran. 
Usually, the trainer encourages the candidate to read six 
particular chapters of the Koran: Baqara, Al Imran, Anfal, 
Tawba, Rahman, and Asr, which feature such themes as jihad, 
the birth of the nation of Islam, war, Allah's favors, and the 
importance of faith. Religious lectures last from two to four 
hours each day. The living martyr goes on lengthy fasts. 
He spends much of the night praying. He pays off all his debts, 
and asks for forgiveness for actual or perceived offenses. 
If a candidate is on the wanted list of the Israeli security 
services, he goes underground, moving from one hiding place to 
another.

In the days before the operation, the candidate prepares a will 
on paper, audiocassette, or video, sometimes all three. The video 
testaments, which are shot against a background of the sponsoring 
organization's banner and slogans, show the living martyr reciting 
the Koran, posing with guns and bombs, exhorting his comrades to 
follow his example, and extolling the virtues of jihad. The wills 
emphasize the voluntary basis of the mission. "This is my free 
decision, and I urge all of you to follow me," one young bomber, 
Muhammad Abu Hashem, said in a recorded testament before blowing 
himself up, in 1995, in retaliation for the assassination of 
Fathi Shiqaqi.

The young man repeatedly watches the video of himself, as well as 
the videos of his predecessors. "These videos encourage him to 
confront death, not fear it," one trainer told me. "He becomes 
intimately familiar with what he is about to do. Then he can 
greet death like an old friend."

Just before the bomber sets out on his final journey, he performs 
a ritual ablution, puts on clean clothes, and tries to attend at 
least one communal prayer at a mosque. He says the traditional 
Islamic prayer that is customary before battle, and he asks 
Allah to forgive his sins and to bless his mission. He puts a 
Koran in his left breast pocket, above the heart, and he straps 
the explosives around his waist or picks up a briefcase or a bag 
containing the bomb. The planner bids him farewell with the 
words "May Allah be with you, may Allah give you success so that 
you achieve Paradise." The would-be martyr responds, "Inshallah, 
we will meet in Paradise."

Hours later, as he presses the detonator, he says, "Allahu akbar" -
"Allah is great. All praise to Him."

The operation doesn't end with the explosion and the many deaths. 
Hamas and Islamic Jihad distribute copies of the martyr's audiocassette 
or video to the media and to local organizations as a record of 
their success and encouragement to other young men. His act 
becomes the subject of sermons in mosques, and provides material 
for leaflets, posters, videos, demonstrations, and extensive 
coverage in the media. Graffiti on walls in the martyr's neighborhood 
praise his heroism. Aspiring martyrs perform mock re-enactments 
of the operation, using models of exploding cars and buses. 
The sponsoring organization distributes cassettes of chants and 
songs honoring the good soldier. When a member of al-Qassam blew 
up himself and his victims in April, 1994, in retaliation for 
the massacre of Muslim worshippers in Hebron by the Israeli 
extremist Baruch Goldstein, he was commemorated in an anthem 
that ushered in a new popular genre of "revenge songs."

The bomber's family and the sponsoring organization celebrate 
his martyrdom with festivities, as if it were a wedding. 
Hundreds of guests congregate at the house to offer congratulations. 
The hosts serve the juices and sweets that the young man specified 
in his will. Often, the mother will ululate in joy over the 
honor that Allah has bestowed upon her family.

But there is grief, too. I asked the mother of Ribhi Kahlout, 
a young man in the Gaza Strip, who had blown himself up, 
in November, 1995, what she would have done if she had known 
what her son was planning to do. "I would have taken a cleaver, 
cut open my heart, and stuffed him deep inside," she said. 
"Then I would have sewn it up tight to keep him safe."