Descent from patient to suicide bomber

Later Latifah visited her new friend in the small home the family occupies in the Jabalya refugee camp. They're nice people, poor people, simple people, Latifah said.

But with her ugly wounds, Wafa lost her friends. She was lonely.

Then, Latifah continued, "Suddenly she said, ‘I want to commit suicide. If there is anyone who will give me a bomb to blow myself up I will do it.’ Her mom shouted, ‘Shut up — don't say that. We don't need more problems’."

Wafa's mother told Latifah that her daughter was sick, unhappy, and might need a psychiatrist. "But her brothers said, ‘No, people will talk about us, they'll think she's crazy. We should take her for a walk. Maybe she will change her mind’."

Worst of cases
Krieger pointed out to us that patients with severe burns usually become depressed and proper psychological counseling is critical, even in the best of cases.

In the Jabalya refugee camp, jilted by her fiance, surrounded by shamed brothers, scared parents and poverty, Wafa al-Biri was the worst of cases.

She was easy pickings for someone with a bomb and a cause. According to Wafa, the al-Aqsa militants came knocking. Here was a vulnerable young woman, willing to die, and moreover with the golden ticket — a pass for humanitarian reasons to a hospital in Israel.

After all, who would check the underwear of a sick young woman on her way to the hospital?

A hundred patients mill around the outpatient ward in the morning. Wafa could die a hero and a martyr with Jewish blood on her hands and not just her veins, after the dozen blood transfusions she received in the Israeli hospital.

And she would have, if the Israeli secret services hadn't received a tip that a female suicide bomber was on the way and alerted all Gaza border crossings. When Wafa showed up Monday morning, the soldiers were ready.

Time freezes
Wafa found herself alone that dawn, locked between a metal turnstile behind her and a metal gate in front, a soldier shouting instructions through a loudspeaker to drop her pants and the bomb, and two cameras recording her every move. She was caught.

Frustrated, Wafa decided to die anyway. As she flinched to her left, with her deformed right hand she brusquely pulled the detonator string in her right pocket. Time froze in that instant. But instead of exploding in a blast of smoke, flame and burning air and lethal metal, the string came out in her hand. Wafa lived.

Thrusting her hand into her pocket and fiddling with the detonator, Wafa tried again and again. Then, in a primeval scream of rage and frustration and smacking her neck again and again, Wafa burst into tears, condemned to live.

As for Krieger, he's alive too and so are all the nurses and patients that would have died if Wafa had succeeded in her plan.

"That evening I came back home and one of my friends called me and asked if I'm going to the synagogue to pray. I said why?" he said.

"Don't you know? Your life has probably been saved by the soldiers. You should send them flowers and say thanks to God. And that's what I'm going to do."

Asked if he would think twice the next time a patient arrives from Gaza, he said no, the hospital treats Palestinians from Gaza every day.

But then Krieger paused and the pause stretched. "Let's say that we treat everyone with no questions, and we always will, wherever they are from," he said finally. "But I never imagined that a patient would try to hurt me. We will have to look more carefully at our security."

For the medical staff of Soroka hospital, a sick person is a patient. But for the Palestinian militants of al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, someone sick like Wafa is just a vulnerable person waiting to be manipulated, a potential suicide bomber.

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