Descent from patient to suicide bomber

Martin Fletcher Correspondent • Profile

BEERSHEBA, Israel - Wafa al-Biri, a 21-year-old Palestinian woman with a lovely face and a quiet voice, seems an unlikely candidate for a suicide mission.

Yet her greatest wish, she told reporters, was to kill 30 to 50 Jews, including children.

The motives of suicide bombers are many, mysterious and murky. And rarely are they as stated by the bombers on camera.

Wafa's case sheds some light on what is to many an incomprehensible phenomenon. Why do people become suicide bombers? More specifically, if male martyrs reputedly get 72 virgins in paradise, what do women suicide bombers get?

Starting with a thank-you note
Wafa, who is from a Gaza refugee camp, claimed she always wanted to be a martyr. She says the Israelis kill and maim her people and she wants to do the same to them.

Only two months earlier, Wafa's family wrote a thank-you note on her behalf to Soroka hospital in the southern Israeli town of Beersheba.

They thanked doctors and nurses, especially Igor Resnik and nurse Mazal, for their "great efforts and wonderful, warm attitude" in helping Wafa survive burns over 45 percent of her body. A gas cooker had blown up while she was making dinner, burning her everywhere except her face.

Dr. Yuval Krieger, the Israeli doctor who treated Wafa, said she arrived from the Palestinian hospital of Shifa with infected burn wounds. The treatment she had was not good and her burns were dressed incorrectly.

"Did you save her life?" Krieger was asked.

"I believe so, yes," he replied.

But Wafa didn't arrive for Monday's 8 a.m. appointment. "I didn't think much about it. I just marked her as one of the people who didn't show up," Krieger said.

Wafa had begun the journey to her appointment with Krieger, arriving at the Erez border crossing from Gaza into Israel around 5:30 a.m., armed with a letter detailing her appointment and her official permission to cross into Israel for humanitarian reasons.

But that wasn't all the young woman was armed with. She carried a 20-pound bomb inside her underwear. Her target was the outpatient clinic of Soroka hospital and, inevitably, the doctor who saved her life.

Descent
But how did the grateful young burn victim become a suicide bomber?

One thing is for sure: It wasn't the religious and nationalist reasons she stated to reporters after soldiers stopped her at the border crossing, made her undress and discard the bomb, which a robot then detonated harmlessly.

It also wasn't her burning desire since childhood to be a martyr, as she claimed. It also wasn't because of the Israeli occupation, which was the motivation of her handlers from the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, the militant group that she said gave her the bomb, drove her to the crossing and gave her instructions.

We know these things because of another young woman, Latifah, whose son shared a ward with Wafa in the Soroka burns unit. Latifah met Wafa in the hospital and they became friends. At her son's bedside, her hands folded, Latifah recounted to NBC News what Wafa told her in the month they spent together, chatting daily.

"Before she was burned her mom told me that Wafa was a very funny girl, very active, laughing a lot," Latifah said. "But after the burning she became very tired and depressed. And often Wafa said to me, ‘I can't live like this, I am so ugly, I want to commit suicide.’ She had a fiance. But after the accident he left her. Then she kept crying, ‘Nobody will want me, I am too ugly, my body is scarred everywhere’."

When Wafa was released from Soroka, she didn't want to leave, Latifah said. "She was screaming, shouting, ‘Please don't let me go. I am better here. I'm going to die.’ But they made her leave, on a stretcher, and they took her home to Gaza."

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