By Samah Sabawi

March 25, 2004

So, Israeli soldiers have stopped a teenaged boy named Abdo from becoming a suicide bomber at the Hawara checkpoint.  How convenient!  How absolutely brilliant!  Overnight, the world wide condemnations of Israel for its brutal and foolish assassination of an old man in a wheel chair turned into outright condemnations against the Palestinians who just can’t seem to stop sacrificing the lives of their children.

Let us take a step back and try to put together the pieces of this story.  Let’s start by examining the scene of the crime.  What do we know about the Howara check point?

According to the AP, the Howara checkpoint is where Israeli soldiers wrote numbers in ink on the hands of hundreds of Palestinians who were waiting to pass through.  The IDF did not bother denying the incident, but they claimed that a lone soldier who “acted on his own and would face a disciplinary hearing” did it.  I’ll take a wild guess, but that hearing probably never happened.  Some of the Palestinians who had three digit numbers scribbled on their palms were interviewed and said that although they felt degraded by the numbers, they had no choice but to accept the humiliation in order to pass through.  Maybe Abdo was once standing in line watching his father being numbered like cattle.  Would that have made him hate enough?  Would that have pushed him into despair?

What else do we know about Howara?  Gideon Levy wrote about this notorious checkpoint in March 2002.  He wrote about the two women who were in labour and tried to pass through to get to the hospital.  Both women were shot and killed in two separate incidents, two days in a row.  Maybe Abdo was watching when Maisoun al-Hayek, a woman in labour, was killed, along with her husband and her father in-law.  Maybe he observed how worthless Palestinian life is and decided his own life had no worth. 

There are so many possibilities as to why Abdo might have chosen to be a suicide bomber.  After all, he lived in Nablus, a city that has been under constant fire for three years.  Did he lose a loved one to the violence? Did he watch the demolition of a relative’s house?  Did he wet his bed at night from fear he may never see the light of day?  Did he sift through the rubbles for a friend’s belongings?  Did he spend weeks looking out his window waiting for a curfew to be lifted?  Did he feel he was dying a slow death?  Did he really plan to blow himself up and if so, who was behind it?  Who would stoop so low as to take advantage of a mentally retarded young boy?  Who would encourage a child to let go of hope and to to take his own life along with others?

There are too many questions surrounding his story.  Too many facts don't seem to add up.  How did the Israeli TV crew arrive so quickly at the scene?  There are hundreds of checkpoints across the occupied territories and it is rare that you find an Israeli TV crew willing to document the dreary lives of the Palestinian captives who may or may not be allowed to pass through. 

Why did the Israeli army announce at first that the boy was 10 then changed it to 12, then it was 14 and finally the parents confirmed he was 16?  Didn’t the boy know his own age? 

Why did the army refuse to allow anyone from the media access to interview him?  What we know about the story is a result of the information fed to us through the IDF and the Israeli press – both sources have poor credibility. 

Finally, the question most worthy of being asked is why would the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades send a retarded kid to do such a dangerous operation?  The last I’ve heard from the news is that thousands of young able men have signed up in the aftermath of Yassin’s assassination to be suicide bombers.  Why Abdo?  His parents have said he was slow and easily lead.  The question is who lead him?

Samah Sabawi, from Gaza and now living in Ottawa, is a writer and activist with Canadian Friends of Sabeel. Her work also appears in several other electronic media.

Other articles by Samah Sabawi on this site:
Hope, Out of Ramallah:  The Rise of the Palestinian Alternative - Interview with Dr. Mustafa Barghouti

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