Lively divorcee outside suicide bomber mould

By PHIL REEVES

On Monday, Wafa Idris, a Palestinian divorcee known for her vivacious manner, gave some chocolate and a pair of toy earrings to her 4-year-old niece Milana. Then she hurriedly left home, saying she was late for work.

As she set off, weaving through the narrow alleys of al-Amari, the West Bank refugee camp where she lived for all her 28 years, her relatives assumed she was planning to spend another day as a volunteer medic.

She worked on the Red Crescent ambulances three or four times a week, often at demonstrations, treating youths injured during confrontations with the Israeli Army.

The family had no inkling of what was about to occur.

"I never thought she would do this," said her sister-in-law Wisam Idris, 25.

Wisam's sister, Maanal, 29, agreed. "She was a laughing, happy woman who was always telling jokes. She liked life."

A few hours after Idris had left her house, an unusually powerful explosion occurred in West Jerusalem's Jaffa Rd. The street, so repeatedly bombed that Israelis now call it Ground Zero, is 10km from her house, although the main road is blocked by two military checkpoints.

The blast killed an 81-year-old Israeli man and injured scores of others. And it killed a young Palestinian woman. Her body was so badly mangled that Israeli police concluded she was either delivering a bomb, or wearing a belt packed with explosives.

If the latter is true, then she was the first female suicide bomber of the 16-month Palestinian intifada.

Either way, she represented an alarming measure of the depths to which the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians has sunk: there have been very few cases of Arab women discovered infiltrating Israel on a mission to murder civilians.

For two days, her identity was a mystery. Then the Israeli authorities announced that she was Wafa Idris, and Palestinian officials in Ramallah confirmed it.

Yesterday posters were pasted up near her home, declaring her to be a heroine of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a militia affiliated to Fatah, the mainstream nationalist movement headed by Palestinian President Yasser Arafat. Masked Fatah gunmen were spray-painting graffiti on the walls, glorifying her memory.

Iraqi President Saddam Hussein moved to make her immortal by announcing that a monument would be erected in her honour in Baghdad.

Yet the mystery lingered. What led a young, outgoing, secular woman to become a bomber, willing to kill randomly?

Idris bore few similarities to most other Palestinian suicide bombers. They tend to be intensely devout, educated in Islamic affairs and driven less by poverty than by nationalist and religious zeal.

She was Westernised - she was photographed in sleeveless dresses and make-up - poor, secular and divorced.

Several years ago she and her husband, Ahmed, agreed to part after 10 years of marriage because she could not have children. One friend said she left him reluctantly, under pressure from his family.

Only recently did her mother, Wafiyeh, 60, notice that she had begun to change, She started to pray at home and cover her hair with a headscarf.

"She always said to me that she wished to be a martyr. I used to argue with her. I said this would mean I would die after her. She replied - no, you will never die, mother."

Friends and relatives of Palestinian bombers invariably try to justify their deeds with accounts of the so-called "martyr's" anger at Israel's conduct, and his spotless character. This was no different. Idris was described as a politically driven woman - one friend said she was forced to repeat one school year three times because she spent so much time at demonstrations during the first Palestinian intifada.

She was depicted as a social worker who helped deaf children at summer camp; a volunteer carer, who took part in a project to paint the home of a single-parent family. Only one associate, who asked not to be named, suggested what she had done was wrong, part of a "farse" in which innocent women and children on both sides are being killed.

But one common theme dominated; her mother said she was driven "crazy" by what she saw as a Red Crescent ambulance volunteer treating youths hit by rubber-coated steel bullets and live ammunition.

Others confirmed that she would grow angry when the subject arose.

One of her closest friends, Muna Abed Rabbo, 28, recalled that about four months ago she was dispatched to a scrape up the remains of a man hit by a tank shell.

"She ended up collecting the flesh in a sack. She told me then - 'I want revenge, revenge, revenge'."

* Israeli forces yesterday killed two Palestinian gunmen who ambushed a convoy headed for the Jewish Gush Katif settlement bloc in the southern Gaza Strip. One person on the truck was slightly wounded.

- INDEPENDENT, REUTERS

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