NABLUS, 26 March 2004 — Palestinian fighters faced a public backlash yesterday for using youths as suicide bombers after Israeli troops caught and persuaded a 14-year-old to take off an explosives vest at a checkpoint.
People throughout the West Bank and Gaza were shocked by the internationally televised footage of a bewildered-looking Hussam Abdu struggling to remove the bomb belt on Wednesday with other Palestinians queued at the roadblock cowering in the background.
“God curse those who recruited and sent Hussam! How could they? He’s only a boy. I’m sure whoever sent him would never have sent his own children to do this,” Nasser Mbayyed, 35, a car mechanic, said in Nablus where Abdu lived with his family.
Training guns on Abdu from a safe distance, Israeli soldiers at the Hawara checkpoint outside Nablus talked the diminutive teenager into removing the vest, then lifting his shirt and dropping his pants to show he was not hiding any other weapon.
An Israeli Army spokesman said Abdu was detained for questioning to determine who dispatched him.
Palestinian fighters vowed to escalate attacks on Israel to avenge its assassination of Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in a missile attack in the Gaza Strip on Monday.
Yesterday’s incident spread panic among parents in Nablus, the West Bank’s largest city and a Hamas bastion, who said they feared armed factions could lure their children into embarking on suicide missions.
Nine days before at the same checkpoint, a Palestinian boy of 12 working as a porter was detained after a bomb was found in a bag on his cart. The boy told soldiers he did not know the bomb was there and was later freed.
There was no claim of responsibility for Abdu’s mission or the earlier episode from the slew of groups waging a Palestinian uprising against Israel in the West Bank and Gaza.
Fighters in President Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction denied Israeli accusations that they had exploited both boys.
“We never recruit children. We don’t recruit anyone under 17 years old,” said Hashem Abu Hamdan, a leading Nablus-based member of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades wanted by Israel.
Palestinian public discontent over violence bubbled to the surface in January when Palestinian groups sent a mother of two and a youth of 17 on suicide missions. She killed four Israeli security personnel, while he killed only himself.
Abdu, in an army videotape provided to journalists, said he decided to blow himself up because “people do not like me”. His mother, Tamam Abdu, said he had been bullied at school.
“I’m happy my son is still alive,” said Abdu’s father, Bilal, 54. “But I’m angry at those who recruited him and angry at Israel because its measures lead to all this.”
He was alluding to military incursions and clampdowns that Israel says are meant to stop suicide bombers but Palestinians call collective punishment because they pin down the population.
A classmate of Abdu who gave his name only as Nasser said Yassin’s murder was a good reason for further suicide bombings.
But Palestinian President Yasser Arafat urged his people to show restraint. On Wednesday, he reiterated his opposition to attacks that target Israeli civilians and commitment to peace through a negotiated settlement with Israel.
Seventy prominent Palestinian intellectuals and politicians joined his appeal, calling in a newspaper advert for peaceful protests over Yassin’s killing rather than bloody revenge.
