Brides of Palestine

Last week hundreds of Palestinian women formed a suicide bomb squad. Are female suicide bombers really different from males?

By Anne Marie Oliver

Read more: Palestine, Feminism, Middle East, Hamas, Life

July 20, 2006 | Last week, amid the chaos and confusion that followed the kidnapping of IDF soldier Gilad Shalit and Israel's subsequent invasion of the Gaza Strip, Fatah's armed wing, the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade, announced the creation of an all-female military branch. In a televised press conference held in Gaza, a heavily veiled woman calling herself Um al-Abed declared that 100 Palestinian women stand ready and willing to become suicide bombers on behalf of the nationalist party founded by the late Yasser Arafat. They intend to carry out strikes not only against Israeli targets, she said, but also against Hamas, Fatah's longtime rival in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. On Tuesday, another group of mujahedat (women devoted to jihad) associated with the Popular Resistance Committees took to the streets of Gaza City, where they burned Israeli, U.S., British, and EU flags -- some with missile launchers resting on their shrouded shoulders.

Though these fledgling female armies may surprise many in the West, a much bigger line was crossed in 2002, when Wafa' Idris, a resident of al-Ama'ari Refugee Camp in the West Bank, became the first Palestinian female suicide bomber. Idris had been forced into an arranged marriage by her elder brother. Like most other Palestinian women, she was dependent almost entirely on male relatives for her economic well-being and survival and had no choice but to accede to her brother's decision. In her heart, however, she remained defiant and never accepted the marriage or her new husband, a first cousin. When she became pregnant against her will, she secretly aborted the child. On top of her unhappy marriage, abortion, and subsequent divorce, Idris was further traumatized by her weekly exposure to blood and death in her work as a paramedic for the Red Crescent, where she volunteered every Friday, caring for large numbers of Palestinians wounded during the second intifada.

It has never been clear whether Wafa' Idris intentionally blew herself up with the 22-pound bomb she was carrying or whether she was simply a courier, but she died in the blast, killing one Israeli and wounding a hundred more. Idris' brother, for his part, said that her decision to become a suicide bomber was due to her work at the Red Crescent and that she was a hero.

Two years later, Hamas sent out its own female suicide bomber -- a 22-year-old woman from a wealthy family in the Gaza Strip and the mother of two young children, one of whom, reportedly, was not yet weaned. Pretending to be crippled, Reem Riyashi arrived at an Israeli checkpoint and requested a personal security check so that she would not have to go through a metal detector. Minutes later, she blew herself up, killing four Israelis. Seven more Israelis and four Palestinians were also injured in the explosion, which was so powerful that it blew the roof off the building and scattered human remains to such a degree that the bomber's body parts could not be distinguished from those of her victims.

Like Idris before her, Riyashi had a secret. She reportedly had had an affair initiated by a Hamas operative, and when she was offered the chance to redeem herself by carrying out a suicide bombing, she took it. Her husband, Palestinian security forces assert, drove her to the checkpoint. Hamas leader Ahmad Yasin had stipulated that a female suicide bomber must be chaperoned by a male.

Once a woman from each of the two major Palestinian factions had carried out a suicide bombing, it was inevitable that others would follow. Yet even as their numbers grow, what is most remarkable about these women is the way in which their stories are presented, particularly in the Western media. The usual motives cited for carrying out a suicide bombing -- humiliation, despair, revenge, hate, fame, money, religion, nationalism, the occupation and combinations thereof -- are deemed insufficient to explain female bombers. Male suicide bombers, of course, often have their own unofficial motivations, but they are rarely the focus of a report. In contrast, the innermost recesses of a woman's psyche, her most shameful secrets -- almost invariably sexual in nature -- are displayed to a world eager for such an unveiling, eager to be shown that women do not truly relish the job of dying and killing.

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When I was a child, I had a Transparent Woman. Not the fancy free-standing type, with the removable pink organs and tiny fetus, but the 2-D type found interlaced between the printed pages of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. I never seemed to tire of turning the plastic leaves that, with each flick of the wrist, revealed more and more -- skeletal system, vascular system, nervous system, and all the major organs -- until at last there was hardly anything left to know. Everything had been laid bare.

A quarter of a century later, I met up with a different manifestation of the Transparent Woman as I was doing fieldwork for a book on suicide bombers in the West Bank and Gaza. One of the main figures in that book was a Hamas devotee who fantasized constantly about the hur, the perpetually virginal maidens of paradise who are said to be the martyr's just reward. Hamza Abu-Surur, his family said, talked about these women all the time. He said that their skin was absolutely transparent, and when they drank water, you could see it flow down and through their bodies -- an act of ingestion he found most beguiling.

Women also seem to find the idea of the hur irresistible. In February 2005, Manuela Dviri -- an Israeli journalist, playwright and peace activist -- interviewed Ayat Allah Kamil, an unsuccessful Hamas suicide bomber, in Hasharon Prison. When Dviri pointed out that male martyrs received 72 hur in paradise and asked what female martyrs received, Kamil replied, "A woman martyr will be the person in charge, the manager, the officer of the 72 virgins, the fairest of the fair." When asked how she got the idea of becoming "head virgin," the 20-year-old answered that God had sent her the idea of making an official request to become a suicide bomber and that she had been fortunate enough to get her request to the right person in Hamas, who happened to be female too. Her dream, she said, was for the world to become Islamic and, in addition, for there to be peace.

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