July 17, 2001

To:                   JCPA Member Agencies

From:              Martin J. Raffel

The tragic suicide bombing yesterday in Binyamina is yet another reminder -- in a long and sad series of reminders -- about the reality Israelis are confronting these days.   The following two articles (by Jeffrey Goldberg in The New Yorker, July 9, 2001, and Jack Kelley in USA Today, July 10, 2001) shed light on the culture that gives rise to this phenomenon. 

In Golberg's article, note the assessment by Boaz Ganor, director of the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Herzliya, that Yasser Arafat "could take apart Islamic Jihad quite easily.  He argues that Arafat preserves the group "to use its terrorists when needed."  Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for yesterday's bombing in Binyamina.  

Both articles relate to the indoctrination of Palestinian children in the glories of martyrdom.   "In Hamas-run kindergartens, signs on the wall read: The children of the kindergarten are the shaheeds (holy martyrs) of tomorrow." (Kelley article) Some have tried to argue, including a number of Arab and Muslim American leaders, that we should distinguish between the terrorism, which they condemn, and the educational and social service programs that provide positive support to an impoverished population.   The truth is that Hamas' terrorism could not exist without the support of its religious and educational institutions.

Also note toward the end of Golberg's article quotes by Marwan Barghouti, head of the Tanzim wing of Fatah (Arafat's part of the PLO), which has coordinated the wave of violence against Israelis since last September.  After getting 100% of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, then, Barghouti said, "we could talk about bigger things."   Surprisingly, given the events of the last ten months, Barghouti reportedly was invited to the residence of the U.S. ambassador in Israel for a July 4th celebration.

You are encouraged to distribute these articles widely to members of the Jewish community, as well at decision-makers and opinion-molders in the general community.

The New Yorker July 9, 2001

THE MARTYR STRATEGY:  What does the new phase of terrorism signify?
JEFFREY GOLDBERG

One day last month, I visited the terrorist Abdullah Shami at his home in the Shejaiya neighborhood of Gaza City. Shejaiya is said to be a stronghold of Islamic Jihad, a group that conducts suicide attacks against Israeli targets, and Shami is the group's leader in Gaza. He lives on the third floor of a concrete-and-plaster apartment house. Before I went upstairs, I met three of his sons in the sand-covered alleyway that leads to the building. The sun was boiling hot, and the building provided shade for the boys and their friends. They were playing a game called shuhada, which means martyrs. The youngest son, Ahmed, who is three, played the shaheed, the martyr, and charged a make-believe Jewish bunker. The other boys made the sound of rifles firing, and Ahmed dropped to the ground and pretended to be dead. His brothers Mahmoud, who is five, and Muhammad, who is six, then carried his limp body down the alleyway, and performed a mock funeral. The game ended when Ahmed rose from his imaginary grave, shouted "Allahu Akbar!" and giggled.

An Islamic Jihad official accompanied me to Shami's sitting room, which was furnished with huge red-and-gold couches. Framed photographs of the Dome of the Rock hung on the walls. Shami, a genial and open-faced man of forty-five, greeted me warmly. He is tall, and has smooth skin and a carefully trimmed beard. He was dressed in a white djellabah and a gray cape with a gold fringe.

The meeting took place during a particularly tense moment in Gaza. Three days earlier, a suicide bomber from the terrorist wing of Hamas, a fundamentalist group, had blown himself up in the middle of a crowd of teen-age girls outside a disco in Tel Aviv. The attack killed twenty-two people, including the bomber, who was infected with hepatitis B, and whose flying body parts may have infected some of the survivors. After the disco attack, Gazans were seized by dread: surely the Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, would retaliate without mercy. But Sharon declared that "restraint is strength" and staved off right-wingers in his Cabinet who demanded severe reprisals. It was an uncharacteristic and widely praised (and presumably temporary) reaction on Sharon's part; but he seemed to sense, correctly, that the West had become repulsed by Palestinian terror attacks, and that such feelings could be exploited by his government.

But, nine months into the Palestinian war of independence, the people of Gaza do not trust Sharon's declarations. As I drove through Gaza City with a Palestinian friend, I noticed dozens of men in the uniforms of the various Palestinian security services; they were afraid to enter office buildings that could be-or already had been-targeted by Israel. Shami, however, did not seem unnerved by the prospect of death at the hands of Israel, even though Israeli agents had assassinated the founder of his group, Fathi Shikaki, on Malta, in 1995.

"Fear is a human sensation," Shami said. "If I say that I am not afraid, I am not human. But fear will not stop me from doing what needs to be done." What his group needs to do, he said, is kill more Jews.

Over the past month, a platoon of international envoys and foreign ministers and would-be peace negotiators have attempted to keep alive a fragile ceasefire negotiated by George Tenet, the C.I.A. director. But few people outside the King David Hotel, in Jerusalem, where these envoys have situated themselves (they are mostly alone in the hotel, tourism to the Holy Land having vanished months ago), believe that the ceasefire will lead to anything except its own failure. Among many Palestinians, in particular, there is depression, and a vow to increase the violence, which has so far gained them nothing except more than five hundred dead and the unfulfilled promise of aid money from the Gulf Arabs. Palestinian society, in its desolation, seems more susceptible than ever to the romance of martyrdom, which explains the resurgent popularity of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the two groups that sponsor suicide bombings.

For Abdullah Shami, ceasefires are distractions, short pauses in the otherwise unrelenting march to Jerusalem. "We must fight Israel until it is gone," he told me. The Jews who are alive can stay in Palestine, he said, adding that "during history, the Jews were most secure under Muslim rule."

On the spectrum of Palestinian militancy, Islamic Jihad stands alone. Unlike Hamas, which also runs schools and hospitals and mosques, Islamic Jihad is exclusively dedicated to terrorism. Hamas claims thousands of members, and hundreds of thousands of supporters; Israeli and American experts say that the hard core of Islamic Jihad consists of several cells in the West Bank and Gaza, with, collectively, several dozen members. (The group's paramount leader, Abdullah Ramadan Shalah, is in Damascus.) Hamas is a threat to the rule of Yasir Arafat's Palestinian Authority, which is dominated by men from Fatah, Hamas's rival. But Islamic Jihad, though more radical than Fatah, is also regarded as more subservient to Arafat than is Hamas, Israeli experts say.

"Arafat has excellent intelligence, and he could take apart Islamic Jihad quite easily," said Boaz Ganor, the director of the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism, in Herzliyya, a city north of Tel Aviv. "I believe that Arafat preserved Islamic Jihad in order to use its terrorists when needed. What he needed was another Black September. The whole idea is deniability." Black September was the group responsible for the 1972 attack on Israeli athletes in Munich. It was initially thought to be independent of Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization, but it is now widely accepted that Black September operated under Arafat's control.

During my visit with Abdullah Shami, I hoped that he would comment on a recent controversy concerning a fatwa, or religious ruling, issued by the Mufti of Saudi Arabia, Sheik Abd Al-Aziz bin Abdallah Al-Sheik, in which suicide bombing was declared contrary to the tenets of Islam. "This is not a part of jihad, and I fear that it is merely killing oneself," the Mufti was quoted as saying.

The ruling of the Saudi mufti was not motivated by moral or theological qualms about the murder of Jews. The questions he raised had to do with the threat that suicide poses to the eternal soul of the Muslim bomber himself. Even so, the fatwa has been met with scorn in many quarters. The head of the Hamas-affiliated Palestinian Islamic Scholars Association, Sheik Hamed Al-Bitawi, stated that "jihad is a collective duty. . . . However, if infidels conquer even an inch of the Muslims' land, as happened with the occupation of Palestine by the Jews, then jihad becomes an individual duty, and, therefore, suicide attacks are permissible."

Shami raised his eyebrows when I mentioned the mufti. He said, "There are some people who are ignorant of certain aspects of Shari'a"-Islamic religious law. "This is not suicide but martyrdom. It is a duty of Muslims." Islamic Jihad bombers, Shami explained, are not men who seek suicide. "We do not take depressed people. If there were a one-in-a-thousand chance that a person was suicidal, we would not allow him to martyr himself. In order to be a martyr bomber, you have to want to live."

A recent poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Public Opinion found that seventy-six per cent of Palestinian respondents approved of suicide bombings that targeted Israelis. And Palestinian religious leaders have for some time been praising the virtues of suicide in the service of their cause. Three years ago, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Sheik Ekrima Sabri, who is the leading Muslim official in Palestinian-controlled territory, explained to me the role of martyrdom in Islamic thinking. "The Muslim embraces death," he said. "Look at the society of the Israelis. It is a selfish society that loves life. These are not people who are eager to die for their country and their God. The Jews will leave this land rather than die, but the Muslim is happy to die."

The attacks have also won support in the wider Arab world. In a column published in May in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Usbu (and disseminated by the Middle East Media Research Institute, in Washington, D.C.), the writer Amru Nasif called for mass suicide attacks against Israelis, and volunteered himself for a suicide mission. "Let us do some mathematical calculations," he wrote. "Two hundred and fifty Palestinians have signed up for martyrdom operations, and it is not impossible to raise this number to a thousand throughout the Arab world. The average harvest of each act of martyrdom is ten dead and fifty wounded. Thus, a thousand acts of martyrdom would leave the Zionists with at least ten thousand dead and fifty thousand wounded." Nasif also pleaded with Allah to let him "become a shaheed" and grant him "the honor of reaping as great a harvest as possible of Israeli lives."

Many Palestinians worry about the glorification of suicide bombers. Ziad Abu-Amr, an expert on Islamic movements at Birzeit University, in the West Bank, and the chairman of the political committee of the Palestine Legislative Council, sees his Gaza constituents embracing suicide attacks as a response to their desperation.

"The entire society is drifting toward religiosity, not necessarily because it has discovered God in the last eight months but because-in the sombre climate of destruction-war, unemployment, and depression cause people to seek solace, and they're going to Allah," he said. "On Friday, at the time of prayer, the streets are blocked now because of the number of people going to mosque. This is a new phenomenon."

One of Abdullah Shami's sons, Hussam, is eighteen years old. I asked Shami if he wants Hussam to become a suicide bomber. "Of course I do," he said. "But it's his own choice. I won't push him in either direction."

As the interview ended, Mahmoud, Ahmed, and Muhammad joined us in the sitting room. Ahmed, the three-year-old, is chubby-cheeked and insouciant. He was wearing a striped yellow shirt, shorts, and sandals, and his hair had been neatly combed before he entered the room. It was impossible for me to understand the impulse that would prompt his father to contemplate sacrificing this child.

"All children who are born eventually die," Shami said. "And death is painful, except in the case of martyrs, who feel no pain as they commit the act that leads to their martyrdom." He added, "Our bodies are the only weapons we have. We don't want to use our bodies as weapons. Maybe you should tell the Israelis to send us other weapons, like Katyushas. Then we won't use our bodies against them anymore." As I left, Ahmed gave me a black Islamic Jihad flag as a keepsake, and slapped me five.

On the morning of May 7th, Israeli surveillance aircraft patrolling the eastern Mediterranean began tracking the movements of a Lebanese fishing trawler called the Santorini. The Mediterranean is a parking lot of fishing boats and cargo ships and yachts, but the Santorini raised suspicions early. "It was a fishing boat that was not fishing," the commander of Israel's Navy, Admiral Yedidia Ya'ari, said one day at his office in Camp Rabin, the headquarters of the Israel Defense Forces, in Tel Aviv. Soon enough, two Israeli missile boats, joined by two attack boats, intercepted the Santorini on rough seas. Soldiers from Flotilla Thirteen, the naval commando unit, boarded the boat, meeting no resistance from the crew of four. The boarding party quickly discovered thirty-nine barrels filled with Katyusha rockets, antitank grenades, and Strella missiles. The crew consisted of veteran Lebanese smugglers, but they were in the employ of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, an extremist group based in Damascus and headed by an aging terrorist named Ahmed Jibril. The barrels were to be set in the water off Gaza at a preselected site-a kind of floating dead drop, Ya'ari said-where they would be retrieved by Palestinians sailing from Gaza.

At a press conference in Damascus a few days later, Jibril, while conceding that the weapons were his, said that the Santorini was the fourth boat he had dispatched to Gaza and only the first to be intercepted. Weapons such as Katyushas and SA-7 Strellas pose little threat to the Israeli Army: they are strategic, not tactical. "These are pretty crappy weapons," Ya'ari said, "but the SA-7 can take down a Boeing 747."

The seizure of the Santorini was a significant event-a foreshadowing of the sort of conflict that Abdullah Shami hopes to see. The Palestinian revolt, which is known as the Al-Aqsa Intifada, after the mosque that sits atop the Temple Mount, in Jerusalem, has gone through three phases so far. The first was the seemingly spontaneous eruption of rock-throwing and protest that followed Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount last September, when Sharon was still the opposition leader. Then came a phase in which Jewish settlers and Army outposts in the West Bank and Gaza-as well as the Gilo neighborhood of Jerusalem-came under Palestinian rifle fire. The third phase was spearheaded by Hamas and Islamic Jihad: the suicide bombings, as well as mortar attacks launched against targets in Gaza and inside Israel by other factions. Today, the conflict teeters between ceasefire and a fourth phase, this one of violent escalation. The use of strategic weapons could initiate the kind of cataclysmic fighting between Israelis and Palestinians that would lead to a full-blown regional war.

"There are three scenarios," Boaz Ganor, the terrorism expert, said. "One, Arafat stops the violence. Two, there's an ongoing war of attrition and Arafat waits for an Israeli mistake-an Israeli shell is bound to hit some schoolchildren. This leads to an international outcry that requires Israel to make more concessions. Three, Arafat decides to escalate, starting a war. If he has the ability to shoot down an El Al plane, or to launch Katyushas from the West Bank into the Tel Aviv suburbs, he would force a powerful Israeli response. The disturbing part is that it is all in Arafat's hands."

Israeli intelligence experts are convinced that forces controlled by Arafat were to be the ultimate recipients of the weapons on the Santorini. But Arafat's ways are mysterious, and it is difficult to shake from the Israelis hard proof-if it exists-of his intentions. In recent days, under American pressure, Arafat has ordered his security services to clamp down on certain types of anti-Israel attacks. In so doing, he undermined his own claim that he could not control the violence of the past nine months. But it also seems true that there are groups operating against Israel that exist outside his direct control. Among these, along with Hamas, are Jibril's Popular Front and the Lebanese Hezbollah, which is sponsored by Iran and which has allied itself with Islamic Jihad. And factions loyal to Osama bin Laden, who many believe is trying to insert himself into the Palestinian-Israeli conflict by violence, are not beholden to Arafat. So many splintered organizations make any Palestinian agenda confusing to the point of stupefaction, but it is fair to say that the ideological gaps among all these groups have lately shrunk, with disturbing consequences.

In order to find out what Ahmed Jibril was planning for his intercepted shipment of rockets, I went one afternoon to a meeting of his Popular Front. The meeting was held at a wedding hall called the Casablanca, which is situated in the heights of Ramallah, on the West Bank, just north of Jerusalem. The meeting drew a large crowd, roughly five hundred people, including representatives from the main religious and secular fighting groups. Strung on a wire running across the ballroom were posters featuring the tired face of Jibril, a secularist who is more closely associated with the Red Army and the Baader-Meinhof gang of the nineteen-seventies than with the bin Ladens and Islamic Jihads of today.

The program was ponderous; each faction leader spoke in praise of Jibril and of the Palestinians killed in the current uprising. The local Hamas chief, Hassan Yusuf, rose to celebrate the poll results that showed strong public support for suicide bombings. Yusuf earlier told me that, shortly after a Hamas bomber killed several Israelis at a shopping mall in Netanya in May, he and his followers handed out candy at their mosque in celebration.

The Casablanca was humid and filled with smoke, and men with guns circulated through the crowd. Sweet Turkish coffee, distributed in small plastic cups, kept everyone awake. Then Marwan Barghouti entered the hall, flanked by uniformed men carrying AK-47s. His presence caused a stir; he is the Fatah leader of the uprising in the West Bank, and is often mentioned as a possible successor to Yasir Arafat. It was surprising to see Barghouti at the Popular Front meeting. He is, after all, a Fatah man; Fatah is Yasir Arafat's faction, and Arafat and Ahmed Jibril are antagonists.

But Barghouti, whom I have interviewed several times over the past months, has changed. At the outset of the uprising, Barghouti was fond of noting that he counted among his friends several members of the Israeli Parliament. He no longer makes such claims. Just two weeks ago, Israel accused him of being directly involved in the killing of a Greek Orthodox monk who was shot to death outside Jerusalem by gunmen who apparently mistook him for an Orthodox Jew. Barghouti is said to have provided the gunmen with their weapons, a charge he has denied. The day before the Popular Front meeting, I had talked to Barghouti in his office, on the third floor of a five-story residential apartment building in Ramallah. He is afraid of assassination-one of his deputies was killed by a missile fired from an Israeli helicopter-and this fear is apparently why he has placed his headquarters between apartments that house families with children. During the interview, I asked Barghouti an obvious question: What would Israel have to do to bring an end to the uprising?

"We need one hundred per cent of Gaza, one hundred per cent of the West Bank, one hundred per cent of East Jerusalem, and the right of return for refugees," he said. I pointed out that former Prime Minister Ehud Barak had, at the Camp David summit last year, offered the Palestinians a series of dramatic concessions: a free Gaza, around ninety per cent of the West Bank, a capital in East Jerusalem, and so on. "No!" Nothing less than a hundred per cent is acceptable, he said. And if you get a hundred per cent? Will that end the conflict? Barghouti smiled, and then said something impolitic for a Fatah man. "Then we could talk about bigger things," he said. Such as? "I've always thought that a good idea would be one state for all the peoples," he said. A secular democratic Palestine? "We don't have to call it Palestine," he replied. "We can call it something else."

Perhaps no one better personified the enigma of Palestinian desire than Faisal Husseini, who was the chief P.L.O. figure in Jerusalem and who, at the time of his death, of a heart attack, in late May, was hailed as an exemplar of coexistence-a "political prisoner turned peace advocate," the Times called him. Two years ago, in his office in East Jerusalem, Husseini told me, "The only hope is for the Israelis to give up their dreams, and for the Palestinians to give up their dreams. It is the only way we will free ourselves from our nightmares."

But in his last months Husseini spoke at a conference in Teheran which brought together leaders of Hezbollah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad. And in a speech delivered in Beirut in April he said, "We may lose or win, but our eyes will continue to aspire to the strategic goal; namely, Palestine from the river to the sea"-from the Jordan to the Mediterranean. "Whatever we get now cannot make us forget this supreme truth."

In recent months, it was as if Barghouti and Husseini had fired up a time-travel machine and taken us back to 1968, when the leaders of the P.L.O. still spoke unabashedly of erasing Israel from the map of the world.

Dusk settled over Ramallah, and Ahmed Jibril's followers left the Casablanca. Husam Arafat, Jibril's representative on the West Bank, sat on a folding chair and answered questions. He is a lawyer, humorless and ascetic in appearance. He, too, spoke of a "Palestine from the river to the sea." When I told him I was surprised to see Barghouti at his meeting, he appeared offended, and waved over the Fatah leader, who was surrounded by a clutch of admirers.

"He says you shouldn't be here," Arafat told Barghouti.

"Why?" Barghouti asked me.

"Because Yasir Arafat and Ahmed Jibril are enemies, and because your ideologies are so different."

Barghouti took Husam Arafat's hand. "We're all fighting together now," Barghouti said.

I asked Barghouti about the Santorini. "It's too bad what happened," he said. "If someone sends you a gift, you should always try to accept it."

After Barghouti and his men left the hall, I asked Arafat why his boss, Ahmed Jibril, was sending rockets to Gaza.

"The General Command decided that it would provide a full range of military services to the uprising," he said. I asked him if he hoped to shoot down planes, but he just smiled wanly and changed the subject.

It turned out that there was something on his mind. "Everyone keeps saying that Hamas and Islamic Jihad invented suicide bombing," he said. "But this isn't true. It was the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command that invented the suicide bombing. We did the first one in 1974, before there was even a Hamas. I think people don't understand the proper role of the Popular Front in the history of the struggle. It was us, not Hamas." I promised him that this fact would be noted. (c)

Devotion, desire drive youths to ‘martyrdom’

By Jack Kelley, USA TODAY

ZARQA, Jordan - The Hotaris are preparing for a party to celebrate the killing of 21 Israelis this month by their son, a suicide bomber. Neighbors hang pictures on their trees of Saeed Hotari holding seven sticks of dynamite. They spray-paint graffiti reading “21 and counting” on their stone walls. And they arrange flowers in the shapes of a heart and a bomb to display on their front doors. “I am very happy and proud of what my son did and, frankly, am a bit jealous,” says Hassan Hotari, 54, father of the young man who carried out the attack June 1 outside a disco in Tel Aviv. It was Israel’s worst suicide bombing in nearly four years. “I wish I had done (the bombing). My son has fulfilled the Prophet’s (Mohammed’s) wishes. He has become a hero! Tell me, what more could a father ask?”

In more than a dozen interviews with former and current members of the militant group Hamas and with Israeli security officials who track them, USA TODAY was given a rare look into the secretive and terrifying world of suicide bombers and the culture that creates them.

Lured by promises of financial stability for their families, eternal martyrdom and unlimited sex in the afterlife, dozens of militant Palestinians like Hotari aspire to blow themselves up, Israeli and Palestinian officials say. Their goal: to kill or injure as many Jews as possible in the hope that Israel will withdraw from Gaza and the West Bank.  Israel captured the land in 1967.

The bombings, which have spread fear and despair among Israelis, have proved to be the deadliest weapon in the Palestinian arsenal during the current intifada, or uprising. The intifada has claimed more than 600 lives, most of them Palestinian, since September.

“Even if we can’t reach the goal of an end to occupation, we are inflicting losses on the enemy,” says Abdel Aziz Rantissi, a spokesman for Hamas. The group has claimed responsibility for most of the suicide bombings. “Israelis will have no stability and no security until the occupation ends. Suicide bombers are Israel’s future.”

Since 1993, nearly 190 people have been killed and thousands injured in 28 suicide bombings in Israel. Three of those bombings have occurred since March, including the Tel Aviv disco attack. A fragile Israeli-Palestinian cease-fire has held for nearly a month, but Hamas officials warn of two more bombings in the “very near future.”

“When I walk outside, young (Palestinian) children come up to me and say, ‘Conduct another bombing to make us happy, sheik,’ “ says Sheik Hasan Yosef, 45, the senior Hamas leader in the West Bank city of Ramallah. “I cannot disappoint them. They won’t have to wait long.”

Visions of paradise

At any time, Israeli officials believe, Hamas has from five to 20 men, ages 18 to 23, awaiting orders to carry out suicide attacks. The group also claims to have “tens of thousands” of youths ready to follow in their footsteps. “We like to grow them,” Yosef says. “From kindergarten through college.”

In Hamas-run kindergartens, signs on the walls read: “The children of the kindergarten are the shaheeds (holy martyrs) of tomorrow.” The classroom signs at Al-Najah University in the West Bank and at Gaza’s Islamic University say, “Israel has nuclear bombs, we have human bombs.”

At an Islamic school in Gaza City run by Hamas, 11-year-old Palestinian student Ahmed’s small frame and boyish smile are deceiving. They mask a determination to kill at any cost. “I will make my body a bomb that will blast the flesh of Zionists, the sons of pigs and monkeys,” Ahmed says. “I will tear their bodies into little pieces and cause them more pain than they will ever know.”

“Allahu Akbar,” his classmates shout in response: “God is great.”

“May the virgins give you pleasure,” his teacher yells, referring to one of the rewards awaiting martyrs in paradise. Even the principal smiles and nods his approval.

“You don’t start educating a shaheed at age 22,” says Roni Shaked, a terrorism expert and former officer in Israel’s Shin Bet secret service.  “You start at kindergarten so by the time he’s 22, he’s looking for an opportunity to sacrifice his life.”

Some suicide bombers, like Hotari, come to their deadly missions by a slightly different route. They turn themselves into human bombs because they are frustrated by the economic and political duress Palestinians experience in Jordan and throughout the region.

Hamas says its recruiters, most of whom Israeli officials describe as charismatic religious leaders, look for two qualities in a potential bomber: an intense interest in Islam and a clean criminal record so as not to raise the suspicions of Israel’s secret service.

Saeed Hotari, who was 22, fit both of those criteria. He was “a devout Muslim who used to pray, observed fasting and performed all his religious obligations to the letter and spirit,” his father says. One of nine children, he left Zarqa, outside the Jordanian capital of Amman, for the West Bank city of Qalqilya in 1999 to seek a better life.

In Qalqilya, he and two other Palestinian youths went to a mosque where Sheik Jamel Tawil, a Hamas leader, persuaded them to attend a Hamas-run class on Islamic study. All would eventually be suicide bombers and would carry out their attacks within days of each other.

At the Hamas-run classes, recruits are reminded of Israel’s “illegal occupation” of the West Bank and Gaza, its “barbaric treatment” of Palestinians and the Islamic prophet Mohammed’s call for Muslims to wage war against infidels. “Kill the idolaters wherever you find them,” Yosef says.

(Israeli officials say they are targeting militant leaders like Yosef for arrest or assassination).

After several weeks of schooling, the youths often volunteer to be suicide bombers, Yosef says. “If someone confiscated your land, demolished your home, built settlements to prevent you from coming back, killed your children and blocked you from going to work, wouldn’t you want to fight for your country?” Yosef asks.

In return for “martyrdom,” Hamas tells the youths that their families will be financially compensated, their pictures will be posted in schools and mosques, and they will earn a special place in heaven.

They also are promised something more risqué: unlimited sex with 72 virgins in heaven. The Koran, the sacred book of Islam, describes the women as “beautiful like rubies, with complexions like diamonds and pearls.” In one of the passages of the Koran, it is said the martyrs and virgins shall “delight themselves, lying on green cushions and beautiful carpets.” Since the time of Mohammed, martyrs have always been considered those willing to die defending Islam.

Holy rewards for suffering

For some young Muslims, that offer is too much to turn down.

“I know my life is poor compared to Europe or America, but I have something awaiting me that makes all my suffering worthwhile,” says Bassam Khalifi, 16, a Hamas youth leader in Gaza’s Bureij refugee camp. “Most boys can’t stop thinking about the virgins.”

But in the end, says Shaked, the Israeli terrorism expert, most of the bombers don’t sign up for martyrdom for the promise of unlimited sex. “They join because of their absolute devotion to God and their desire to die with Jewish blood on their hands,” he says. “It’s not a heroic thing, it’s a holy thing.”

A would-be bomber is selected for his mission only days, sometimes hours, before it is to occur, Israeli officials say. As part of the preparation, the recruit is taken to a cemetery, where he is told to prepare for death by lying between gravesites for hours. He wears a white, hooded shroud normally used to cover bodies for burial, a former Hamas member says.

The recruit is then taken to a safe house. A video is made in which he states his consent to become a suicide bomber and his devotion to Islam. It will be played for the public after his death. A still photograph is taken that will be reproduced and displayed through the West Bank and Gaza to honor him after death.

Because secrecy is paramount, Hamas leaders will not allow the recruit to say goodbye to his family or tell them his plans.

Meanwhile, separate Hamas groups already have selected the target, constructed the bomb that will be attached to the recruit’s belt and started preparations to get him to the site, Israeli officials say.

Once at the target site, the recruit is told to remain calm, blend in as much as possible and, when surrounded by Israelis, press a switch to explode the bomb, Hamas members say. Just as Hotari’s friend Mahmoud Marmash did.

On May 18, Israeli security guard Lior Kamisa saw Marmash, 21, standing in line with dozens of Israelis outside a shopping mall in the Israeli seaside city of Netanya.

“We locked eyes,” Kamisa recalls. “His eyes were frozen. They showed no emotion.” Realizing that Marmash looked out of place among the Israelis and was wearing an oversized blue sport jacket, Kamisa radioed for help.

It was too late. Marmash slowly unbuttoned his jacket, slipped his hand inside and pressed a switch that ignited the dynamite. The explosion killed five Israelis. Kamisa looked for Marmash but couldn’t find him. “He was gone. He had turned to dust.”

On June 1, it was Hotari’s turn. Israeli officials, quoting eyewitnesses, say two Hamas operatives drove him to the Dolphin Disco in Tel Aviv, a popular club often packed with Russian immigrant teenagers. They said Hotari slipped unnoticed into line and positioned himself among several girls, including a 14-year-old who had survived Marmash’s attack in Netanya.

Then, while flirting with one of the girls, Hotari triggered the explosives.  The blast was so intense that it tore limbs from the victims’ bodies, scattered their flesh up to six blocks away and vaporized Hotari and the girl next to him.

It killed 21 people, in addition to Hotari, and injured nearly 100.

Now, nearly 30 days later, his parents are preparing to mark the anniversary of his death, as devout Muslims often do.

“My prayer is that Saeed’s brothers, friends and fellow Palestinians will sacrifice their lives, too,” Hotari’s father says. “There is no better way to show God you love him.”