By January 29, 2018 Read More →

October 21, 2005 Murder “A History of Violence”

21-year-old Wafa Samir al-Bas was detained in June after the explosives she was carrying failed to detonate at an Israeli checkpoint on the border with Gaza. As Ms. Bas later testified, her target was an Israeli hospital where she had previously been treated — as a humanitarian gesture — for burns suffered in a kitchen accident. “I wanted to kill 20, 50 Jews,” she explained at a press conference after her arraignment.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict no longer rivets world attention the way it did a few years ago. Still it rolls along, as it has for decades and as it probably will for decades to come. And the reason for this is well-captured by Mr. Abbas’s use of the term “prisoners of freedom.”

Who are some of these prisoners? One is Ibrahim Ighnamat, a Hamas leader arrested last week by Israel in connection to his role in organizing a March 1997 suicide bombing at the Apropos cafe in Tel Aviv, which killed three and wounded 48. Another is Jamal Tirawi of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades: Mr. Tirawi had bullied a 14-year-old boy into becoming a suicide bomber by threatening to denounce him as a “collaborator,” which in Palestinian society frequently amounts to a death sentence.

Source: Stephens, Bret. The Wall Street Journal, October 22, 2005.

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