Why a Palestinian girl now wants to be a suicide bomber

The living room of the Oudeh family, with its flowered settees and polished stone coffee table, its carved wooden antelopes and framed needlepoints, seems an unlikely place to meet a terrorist, even a hypothetical one.

But Shireen Oudeh, 14 years old, a delicate gold chain hanging over the collar of her beige turtleneck, doesn't bridle at the label. "If Sharon is calling us terrorists," she says, referring to Israel's prime minister, "we should show him the terror."

Would she herself become a suicide bomber? "If God wills it," she says in a low, serious voice. "If I had the means, I would have done it yesterday."

In Shireen's world, the Deheisheh refugee camp in Bethlehem, there is nothing hypothetical about her answer. On Friday, 18-year-old Ayat Akhras, a friend and neighbor, walked up to a supermarket in Jerusalem and detonated her explosives, killing two Israelis and herself.

Israel is mounting its most expansive operations yet in the Palestinian territories, but the outcome of previous incursions, including an invasion of Deheisheh in early March, illustrates the paradoxes and limitations of Israel's efforts to stop suicide bombings and destroy what Israeli officials call the "infrastructure of terror."

Occupying Palestinian areas curtails militant activity, Israeli officials say, but only up to a point and only as long as Israeli troops maintain their presence. When the troops pull out, they sometimes leave people ever more determined to strike at Israel. "Government and military officials are always trying to strike a balance between the absolute need to fight terror ... and the negative repercussions of too much force," says an Israeli official who declined to be named. "Nobody is kidding themselves that there aren't negative repercussions."

Three weeks ago, Israeli forces seized weapons and made arrests in Deheisheh, but they also killed a non-combatant named Issa Faraj, a construction worker who residents say was shot while he was playing with Legos with one of his children. Members of the Akhras family went to help their mortally wounded neighbor, and Ayat screamed when she saw him, says her father, Samir Akhras.

Ayat gave no inkling of her intentions before her suicide operation, says Mr. Akhras and her fiancé Shadi Abu Laban. She was a pious Muslim, Mr. Abu Laban says, and not overtly political. But now that the two men are spending their days comforting each other as they receive mourners, they remember the scream and wonder whether her shock and horror drove her to her act.

The al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a militant group allied with Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, said it was responsible for sending Ayat to kill herself, and presumably as many Israelis as she could. According to a report in Britain's Guardian newspaper, the militia has set up a special suicide-bomber unit for women.

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