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Heaven Can Wait
Isabel Kershner
15-year-old Gaza boy tells how Hamas recruited him as a suicide bomber and why he changed his mind
Musa Ziyada arrives for our meeting late. The 15-year-old school-boy had come home from classes and fallen asleep. Still rubbing his huge almond eyes and yawning occasionally, he finally shuffles into his father's office at 3 in the afternoon in the Rimal district of Gaza city and takes a seat across the table.
It's a wonder he's here at all. On the fifteenth day of Ramadan (or February 14), the anniversary in the Muslim calendar of the 1994 Hebron massacre, Musa, an intelligent and earnest Hamas activist, was supposed to have strapped a belt of eight kilograms of TNT around his waist and entered Israel as a human bomb. By blowing himself up along with as many Israelis as he could manage, he was expecting to go directly to heaven; his victims, he says, would go to hell. He was stopped just days before his mission by his alert father and an uncle, who had grown suspicious and handed him over to the Palestinian police.
"In the mosque, they told me that martyrdom means paradise, and that the only way to paradise is through martyrdom," Musa explains. "But I thank God that the suicide act didn't happen, because now I'm convinced it's wrong - both from a religious and personal point of view."
Musa's smooth olive skin and the downy shadow over his upper lip give him a look of innocence that belies the nature of the lethal journey he almost took. Paradise, he says, is a place where he would find "all the pleasures of life and more." A place with no death ("the last station"), full of palaces and gardens flowing with rivers of milk and delicious wine - with the alcohol taken out.
"They" told him that as a martyr, he could gain entry to heaven for 70 relatives and friends, no questions asked. And that 70 virgin brides would await him there. "Wine and women," interjects his father, Hisham, with a hearty laugh. "That was it! Admit it!" It's in the Koran, Musa retorts quietly, trying not to look embarrassed.
"They" are two members of the Izz al-Din al-Qassam brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, men in their mid-30s who told Musa he was true martyr material and started to train him. "They're just ordinary people," he says, giving the word `ordinary' a whole new meaning. "Their main job is to persuade boys of our age to be suicide bombers." Asked whether he questioned why the two didn't go themselves, Musa replies: "I didn't want to argue, just to be convinced."
Musa was born in the Bureij refugee camp south of Gaza city in 1980, the fourth of nine children. His father, Hisham, a slim, European-looking man of 43 with blue-green eyes and a loud, ready laugh, hardly looks the part of parent of a would-be suicide bomber. Sitting in the front office of his family firm, an aluminum window-frame workshop, he is sporting a red polo-neck, black silky jacket, jeans and tartan suspenders.
Hisham can joke about the experience now, and never misses an opportunity to do so. His son solemnly explains that a suicide bomber who blew himself up in Jerusalem in December but who didn't manage to take any Israelis with him will still go to heaven, because his intentions were "jihadi." But he'll only get 35 virgins, the father guffaws.
The Ziyadas are not a religious family, though Musa's mother and grandfather pray as many ordinary Muslims do. But from an early age, Musa was particularly attracted to Islam. At 10, he was a regular at the mosque and was considered something of a prodigy in Koran. By 12, he was a member of Hamas.
"Despite his youth, he was given the title of `emir,' or prince, because of his religious proficiency and knowledge of the Koran," Hisham relates, with a mixture of pride and bewilderment. "Musa was trusted. Doctors and engineers used to flock to visit him in our home." Musa also loves soccer and played on the mosque team ("a Hamas team -no shorts," says Hisham).
About eight months ago, the family left Bureij and moved to Gaza city's Darraj neighborhood, to be closer to the business. Musa was happy with the move and immediately joined the Izz al-Din al-Qassam mosque near his new home. He came with recommendations from the mosque at Bureij, and quickly became something of a local celebrity.
When the bombs started exploding, killing dozens of Israelis from Afulah to Tel Aviv's Dizengoff Street, Musa began to talk about martyrdom and heaven. "He began to mention it more and more," says the father. "When bombs went off, he'd say `Wow, I wish I was that martyr.'" He thought the suicide bombing at the Beit Lid junction in January, which killed 21 Israelis, was excellent. "Still, we didn't think much of it," Hisham says. "That's how some of the boys in the street talk."
It was the winter vacation from school. Musa said he wanted to spend some time at Bureij with his friends and family that he'd left behind there. He was given permission, and after about 10 days, his father traveled down to check up on him. When he heard from Musa's aunt and sisters there that they had hardly seen him, he began to get suspicious.
One of Hisham's brothers, Samir, is an intelligence officer in the Palestinian police. He was hearing from "his boys" in Bureij that Musa had been attending secret sessions in the mosque; he finally came to Hisham and told him he'd better watch his son. The father went to Bureij and made Musa come home.
Musa, meanwhile, had attended two secret sessions with his Hamas operators. The first, he says, was to tell him he'd been chosen and to get his agreement. "I wanted to be a martyr but I wasn't a volunteer," Musa says. "They convinced me."
The second session was to explain the outline of what he would have to do. "I wasn't told the location of the attack, but I was told people would help me and be with me all the time, even inside Israel," Musa relates. The third session, for the final details, was set for the 13th of Ramadan. He had told his father that he absolutely had to go back to Bureij that day, to help with a Hamas food distribution. But by then, Hisham had made up his mind that Musa was in trouble, and took him to the police.
"I was scared," Musa recalls. "The police were very nervous around me at the beginning and I was confused. I didn't know what to say." Before he could say much, his interrogators found on him a handwritten will that said it all. In it, Musa had asked forgiveness from his family and wrote that he'd see 70 of his relatives and friends in heaven.
Musa spent the next week-and-a-half in custody, and was released a few days before the end of the Ramadan feast. At that point, Hamas spokespeople denied Musa's story, and said the police had tortured him into giving a false confession. Musa claims he was beaten by his interrogators (his father vehemently denies it), but says matter-of-factly that, truth aside, Hamas has to defend its interests.
After months of admonishment from Israel that it has done little to stop Palestinian terrorism, the Palestinian Authority in Gaza is now making efforts, at least to improve its image and impart a sense of goodwill. Yasser Arafat has announced that his police have prevented at least 10 terror attacks recently; and Musa and two other teenage would-be suicide bombers who had changed their minds have been presented to the press in Gaza.
The Israeli public has been outraged by the recent levels of Palestinian terrorism, and after the Beit Lid attack, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin predicated a resumption of the autonomy talks with the Palestinians on a serious attempt by Arafat to quell the phenomenon.
Since then, the Palestinian Authority has announced the establishment of military courts and the Palestinian police have carried out a mini-crackdown on the radical Islamic Jihad, which claimed responsibility for Beit Lid and which is an easier target than the more popular Hamas. The offices of the Islamic Jihad newspaper, Istiqlal, have been closed and several of the radical organization's leaders are in detention.
The talks have resumed, but there is evidently still a way to go. Brig. Sa'eb al-Ajez, the National Security Forces commander of the northern Gaza Strip, can barely bring himself to accept any Palestinian responsibility for attacks that have taken place outside Gaza, and instead hints at an Israeli hand in the suicide bombings. "One has to ask how come the bombs used in Dizengoff and Beit Lid were of such high technical quality, when all the ones we've found in Gaza are so crude," he tells The Jerusalem Report in an interview. "How come someone carrying 20 kgs of explosives creates a blast with the force of 50 kgs?"
He goes on to relate that, according to the Palestinian police, the Beit Lid bombers set out from an area of the Gaza Strip under Israel's control, wearing Israeli army uniforms and driving an Israeli military vehicle. When told that his conspiracy theory would be considered shocking and ridiculous by most Israelis, he replies, "I'm not accusing anyone, I'll leave it up to the reader to decide."
But at the same time, he tells of the exchange of information taking place between Israelis and Palestinians on the military liaison committee, which he terms a success. And he himself has been taking part in joint anti-terror training at the sensitive Erez checkpoint and industrial zone at the Strip's northern border with Israel. The training isn't a formal part of the Oslo agreement. "The need just arose," says Ajez. "It's in our interest. We need to protect the Erez area, for the sake of our economy."
What's more, Palestinians argue, they are better positioned to police the Gaza Strip than the Israelis could ever have been. "We know our people," says Brig. Ajez. "From the first glance we can tell things about them that the Israelis can't. The Palestinian police have only been in Gaza for a matter of months. In another five or six months," he declares, "we'll control the whole area. We'll even know who is blinking and who is not."
Says another police source, who works in the southern half of the Strip: "Believe me, when we are on a case, we do a hundred times what the Israelis used to do. We arrest many more people, because we know who they are."
Musa's father Hisham stresses his abhorrence of terrorism. "I want you to explain in your magazine that we are completely against these attacks and are doing our best to stop them." But asked whether he'd have turned Musa in to the Israelis had they still been in control of Gaza, he replies, "Of course not, I'd have been a collaborator! I'd just have kept him at home myself. But many people support the Palestinian Authority, like me, and will help for no money.
Musa has now been persuaded by his father, and an Islamic authority he went to for a second opinion, that it is unIslamic to appoint the time of one's own death. Musa says he still wants to be a martyr, preferably dying for the cause, "but not in a suicide attack."
He expresses no remorse about the fact that he planned to kill as many Israeli bystanders as possible in the process, and says he still supports Hamas's religious and political program. Despite having been saved from the jaws of death, he says he is not angry at Hamas, "but I may argue with them now." At times a little sheepish in front of his father, he comes across as little more than a teen rebel, if a potentially murderous one. He's not too religious to shake a woman's hand, and when an electronic pager goes off in the room, he asks if it's a Gameboy. When he grows up, Musa says, he wants to be a doctor. "To heal people?" this reporter asks, incredulous after hearing the tale of heaven and hell, of eternal life, death and destruction. "Yes," Musa replies quietly, "to heal people."
1995
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