 the summer of 2004, the second intifada, Rasha took the decision to commit suicide as a shahida - martyr - inside Israel. At the age of sweet 16, Rasha wanted to be a suicide bomber.
According to the military indictment, she offered her life over the internet to a man known as Abu Jojo, a leader of the Palestinian fighters of Bethlehem who took part in the siege of the Church of the Nativity in 2002. When he left at the end of the siege, he was deported to Ireland. From there, he continued to operate fighters and suicide volunteers, among them Rasha.
"She is attracted to fighters," her mother Maryam told me when I first met her three years ago, "maybe because she never had a father and identified with the persecuted and wanted men who have no home."
It often happens in the narrative of a suicide volunteer that you
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At the age of 16, Rasha took the decision to commit suicide as a martyr inside Israel |
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immediately identify the psychological trigger for the suicidal deed. Rasha's father, Khaled, left her mother during her pregnancy and all her life Rasha tried to bring her father back to her.
When she was 16 she decided to use the Palestinian struggle to tempt back her recalcitrant father. The indictment describes how she intentionally got her father embroiled in anti-Israel terrorism by getting him to contribute 500 shekels - about £60 - to a group of Palestinians hiding in her mother's home. Thus she made her innocent father a terrorist collaborator in the eyes of the Israeli army.
Rasha was captured by the Israelis before she could commit suicide and was imprisoned for three years in Tel Mond women's prison north of Tel Aviv. During the three months following her capture she did not see her mother and it was only after I 
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Israel: a state of confusion
The ambassador for mayhem
