Imagining Wafa
2003   gouache on paper, 30" x 42"

Woman suicide bomber strikes

Ramallah (West Bank)

A Palestinian woman detonated a suicide bomb in the heart of one of Jerusalem's busiest shopping streets yesterday killing herself, an elderly bystander and injuring at least 100 others, a dozen of them seriously.

It is understood to be the first time a woman suicide bomber has carried out an attack in Israel. During the period of the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, the Iranian-backed Hizbullah used women suicide bombers who had allegedly dishonored their families and who killed themselves to clear the stain, a practice later banned by Islamic authorities.

Wafa Idrees, 28, Palestine's first woman suicide bomber, had told her friends and family she had been haunted by what she had seen working as a Red Crescent volunteer in Ramallah - the deaths and injuries to which she had attended.

Palestinian ambulance crews have been constantly targeted by the Israeli army. The Israeli army says it does not deliberately target the ambulance crews of the Palestinian Red Crescent. The drivers, paramedics and volunteers who go out each day, have every reason to think otherwise. In 16 months of the intifada, 122 of them have been injured by Israeli fire across Gaza and the West Bank.

"The Volunteers and the staff here have seen terrible things," he says. "The psychological effect on these very young people who are evacuating the dead and injured can be profound."

"In the worst cases they are taking bodies away that are quite literally in pieces."

Since then, according to the Sunday Telegraph of London, radical Palestinian Islamist groups have reported a surge of requests from women. Thus

Far Palestinian women have played only supporting roles in military and terrorist operations in the middle-east. But last week' suicide bombing appears to have ended a social taboo, and even the most conservative Islamist groups have come to Appreciate the propaganda benefits of female recruits, the news report said.