06/11/2002
EDITORIAL NUMBER=0-09939

THEY COULDN'T KILL HER CONSCIENCE

Thauriya Hamamreh [thuh-RYE-ah hah-MAHM-ray] is a petite, twenty-five-year-old Palestinian dressmaker from Kafr Jaba [KAH-fer jah-bah], near the West Bank town of Jenin. The Fatah-affiliated al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade terrorist group recruited and trained her to kill herself and as many Israelis as possible. But they could not kill her conscience.

Thauriya told journalists she was emotionally vulnerable and deeply depressed when she first volunteered to be a suicide bomber. Rejected by the man she hoped to marry, upset over the continuing violence around her, she became a willing tool of the terrorists. In late May, they took her to the university at Nablus, where she was kept in a dormitory room. She was fitted with a belt containing sixteen kilograms of explosives and bags of nails and sharp metal. "It reached from my waist to my chest," she said, and was so heavy she could not manage it easily. So her terrorist trainers decided instead to place the bomb in a student backpack. For forty-five minutes she was instructed on how to detonate the device.

Her target was a shopping area of West Jerusalem. She was to find a large crowd as quickly as possible and blow herself up. To make herself look like an Israeli woman, Thauriya was told to wear her hair loose and uncovered, use make-up, and wear-tight-fitting trousers. A deeply religious Muslim, she was profoundly shocked by these orders. She began to have doubts about the morality of what she was preparing to do. "I also began to imagine the people I would be killing, whether they would be women and children, families sitting down at a café," she said. "God would not see it as a good reason for committing suicide," she said, "and therefore would not accept me as a shaheed [martyr]."

She began to look at her terrorist handlers in a different light as well. "I felt they were making a business out of the blood of shaheeds, that all they cared about was that people would say they managed to pull off an attack," she recalled.

Obeying her conscience rather than the instructions of her handlers, Thauriya went to her aunt's home in Tulkarm, where she was arrested by Israeli security forces on May 20^th. She decided to tell the press about her experience in order to help stop the terrorism that is causing suffering to Israelis and Palestinians alike. "The real jihad," she says, lies not in suicide and murder, but "is to believe wholeheartedly and follow the path of Islam."