PALESTINIANS: Bomber Left Her Family With a Smile and a Lie

October 7, 2003
By JOHN F. BURNS

JENIN, West Bank, Oct. 5 — It was a few minutes past 8 a.m. on Saturday when Hanadi Jaradat's parents last saw her. The 27-year-old apprentice lawyer was in a hurry as she walked down the steep, narrow streets of this old Arab town, telling her parents she had a land contract to complete, for a fee of $500 in Israeli shekels, a small fortune for any impoverished family in Jenin.

At the parting, Ms. Jaradat was barely six hours away from her death. In that time, she met with accomplices from the Islamic Jihad militant group, journeyed 30 miles west across the hills to the Israeli city of Haifa, changed from a traditional black Arab cloak and headdress into jeans and a ponytail that made her indistinguishable from the casual weekenders of Israel, and walked into a seaside restaurant to detonate a body-belt bomb. In the blast, she killed herself and 19 others, all Israelis — 14 Jews, 3 of them children, and 5 Arab Christians.

What happened in those hours is the focus now of Israeli investigators, who want to know how Ms. Jaradat reached Haifa, crossing the path of a 400-mile barrier of electrified fencing that Israel is erecting in the hope of halting Palestinian attacks. An Israeli security official said on Sunday that preliminary investigation showed that the bomber had entered Israel through a "hole" in the 90 miles of fence that have been completed in northern Israel — perhaps, although the official did not say so, through a gap that had been left lightly guarded just east of the Palestinian village of Qaffin.

Ms. Jaradat's parents, in Jenin, say questions about the bombing and their daughter's involvement with Islamic Jihad are baffling ones. Right up to the moment of their last farewell, they said, they had no indication that their daughter had any contacts with Islamic militants — no sense, they said, that she had any ambition but to establish her career as a lawyer, marry and have children.

Her father, Tayseer, age 50, moves slowly, suffering from a degenerative liver disease that made it difficult to keep up with his daughter as they walked on Saturday morning, Ms. Jaradat ostensibly to her law office, her parents to the vegetable market in the center of Jenin. So she said she would walk ahead, her parents said, and waved as she walked away, smiling — just as she appeared later, on television, in the traditional suicide bomber's video she made, when she closed the Koran and smiled, shyly, as though preparing for a graduation or a wedding.

"She walked faster than us, saying `Hurry, hurry,' then she went ahead," said Rahmeh Jaradat, 51, the bomber's mother, who gathered her seven surviving children around her as she spoke at her brother-in-law's house in Jenin, where the family moved before Israeli troops arrived in Jenin in the predawn hours of Sunday to demolish their home, the routine punishment for suicide bombers' families.

"She gave us the impression she was in a hurry to complete that deal," her mother said.

"She was happy," her father said.

The suicide bombing was one of more than 100 in the past three years of the uprising that Palestinians call the Aqsa intifada, attacks that have killed about 430 people, about half the intifada's Israeli victims. But the Haifa attack was heard around the world, because it was followed by an Israeli airstrike in Syria, and prompted the United Nations Security Council to meet in a special session on Sunday.

In Israel, the Haifa attack cast a heavy pall over Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. In a relative's home in the Old Quarter of Jenin, a short walk from the field of tumbled stones that is all that is left of their old house, the Jaradats had their own story of loss, before that of Hanadi — the shooting death in Jenin four months ago of their oldest son, Fadi, 23, and his cousin Saleh, 31, during an Israeli crackdown.

But a visitor meeting the Jaradats found no overt grieving for Hanadi, and no sympathy for the Haifa victims, at least none the family would acknowledge. Jenin is ringed by Israeli armor, a city not far from Lebanon and Syria that has become a stronghold of Islamic Jihad, with simmering hostilities among its 30,000 people. Eighteen months ago, in one of the harshest attacks of the intifada, the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon cracked down with infantry, tanks and bulldozers that killed dozens of Palestinians and left an entire neighborhood in rubble.

Much about the Jaradats suggested the careworn but proud gentility found in many Palestinian homes. There was elaborate courtesy, and thick cups of Turkish coffee. The family recounted a common Palestinian saga — the father's long years working in Israel as a house painter, the struggle to support Hanadi when she studied law in Jordan, the sense of hopelessness once Israel closed its borders to Palestinian workers after the conflict began, the reliance on the pittances Fadi, their son, could earn working in the vegetable market.

But on the subject of the bombing, the responses sounded programmed, as though the family were more concerned about the pervasiveness of Islamic holy war in Jenin than in voicing their innermost thoughts. In place of tears, there were wan smiles when the family talked about Hanadi's death, and a studied indifference to the carnage she caused. The parents spoke of the attack as "God's will."

When asked if they had any words of sorrow for the Haifa victims and their families, a silence fell. Eventually, Mrs. Jaradat spoke up. "Tell them they should think about why our daughter did this," she said.

After another pause, she continued: "She has done what she has done, thank God, and I am sure that what she has done is not a shameful thing. She has done it for the sake of her people."

Mr. Jaradat said: "I don't want to talk about my feelings, my pain, my suffering. But I can tell you that our people believe that what Hanadi has done is justified. Imagine yourself watching the Israelis kill your son, your nephew, destroying your house — they are pushing our people into a corner, they are provoking actions like these by our people."

The bombing and its aftermath prompted Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, to appoint an "emergency cabinet" to guide the Palestinians through the crisis. [But the new prime minister, Ahmed Qurei, said Monday that while he hoped to negotiate a truce to halt suicide bombings, there would be no use of force against groups like Islamic Jihad, as urged by the United States. "I will not listen to the Americans; I will listen to our national rights," he told The Associated Press.]

On its face, the bombing appeared to have exposed the new Israeli barrier as a sort of Maginot Line, which failed in one of its first crucial tests.

Another issue to be investigated is that Islamic Jihad, normally conservative on the role of women, used a woman to carry out the bombing.

Yet another point of inquiry for the investigators is the fact that Ms. Jaradat changed into Western clothes. In Jenin, her parents said, they had never seen her wear anything outside her home but a traditional Arab robe and a headdress. Somewhere along the road to Haifa, she found time to change and perhaps to record the video released by Islamic Jihad after the bombing, which showed Ms. Jaradat wearing a black and silver sash, the colors of Islamic holy war, inscribed with the words that open the Koran, "There is no God but God."

Like many suicide bombers' families, the Jaradats said they had never suspected that their daughter had any links to Islamic militant groups until her photograph flashed up on television on Saturday night as the bomber identified by Islamic Jihad. Hours earlier, they said, they had heard about the attack, and called her on her cellphone to urge her to come home early in case of trouble with Israeli troops. "But her phone was blocked — she didn't answer," Mrs. Jaradat said.

Hanadi Jaradat was deeply religious, rising before 5 each morning to pray and read the Koran. But a new radicalism crept into her remarks about Israelis after her brother died, they said.

"She was full of pain about that," Mrs. Jaradat said. "Some nights, she woke screaming, saying she had nightmares about Fadi." Last week, the family said, Ms. Jaradat went to an Israeli military unit to request a permit for her father to go to Haifa for treatment for his liver ailment.

"The Israelis told her to get out and not come back," Mrs. Jaradat said. "After Fadi, no member of the Jaradat family was going to get a permit to go to Haifa."

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company