The Israeli army said on Wednesday that Hassam Mohammed Hufni Abdo, a 14-year-old Palestinian boy who tried to kill soldiers at a West Bank checkpoint with a belt of explosives strapped to his body, would have been the youngest Palestinian suicide bomber.
The boy, from the West Bank town of Nablus, apparently panicked when soldiers challenged him and he raised his hands in surrender.
Members of the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades in the Balata refugee camp next to Nablus on Wednesday night claimed responsibility for the attempt, according to Associated Press.
The foiled attack, which was captured on film and shown on television, came as the army stepped up checks at roadblocks along the West Bank border to prevent suicide bombers getting through to revenge the assassination of the Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.
Standing beside the boy at the checkpoint four hours after his capture, Captain Sharon Feingold said: ”He looks about seven or eight, but he says he is 14. He began running at the soldiers. They pointed their guns at him and shouted at him in Arabic to stop.
”He raised his arms. He had an [explosives] vest round him. About five to 10kgs. He would have killed the soldiers and the Palestinians in the queue.”
Lieutenant Tamir Milrad said he had noticed that the boy had something under the jersey. The soldiers, shouting from behind concrete blocks, ordered him to take off the jersey. ”He told us he didn’t want to die. He didn’t want to blow up,” Lieutenant Milrad said.
The soldiers sent a yellow robot to hand scissors to the boy so that he could cut off the vest. They ordered him to strip to his underwear, and engineers detonated the bomb.
The incident took place at the Huwarra checkpoint south of Nablus in the afternoon.
Abdo, who is from the Machfia district of Nablus, told reporters that he knew he was carrying explosives, but the army stopped him answering a question about whether he intended to detonate them himself or was acting as a courier for others.
He was taken away by the army last night for interrogation to try to establish which Palestinian cell had sent him.
Captain Feingold said, before the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades claim, that the assumption was that it was the cell that sent an 11-year-old boy, Abdullah Quran, also from Nablus, to the same checkpoint last week. The boy was given a bag containing explosives to carry across the checkpoint.
Last week’s incident was blamed on a group associated with Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement.
Captain Jacob Dallal, said that Abdullah had apparently been tricked into carrying the explosives but Abdo had known, since he had them strapped to his body. Abdullah was released but the army said it was too early to say what would happen to Abdo.
His brother Hosni described Abdo as mentally slow. ”He doesn’t know anything, and he has the intelligence of a 12-year-old,” he said.
Neighbours said the boy was connected to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, one of the smaller groups carrying out attacks in Israel, but his family denied it.
Dore Gold, an adviser to Israel’s prime minister, Ariel Sharon, said: ”No matter how many times Israel learns of the use of children for suicide bombings, it is shocking on each occasion. Israelis do not understand how Palestinians are willing to sacrifice their own children in order to kill ours.”
After the incident the army redoubled its checks all along the border. Long queues formed at the checkpoints ringing Jerusalem.
The Hebrew daily Yedioth reported on Wednesday that Israeli intelligence had recommended that flights into Israel’s main airport, Ben Gurion, should no longer use a runway that requires them to fly over the West Bank.
Another daily, Ma’ariv, said the police were implementing rules on light aircraft to ensure that they were clamped down overnight to prevent them being hijacked by bombers.
There were skirmishes in Gaza and the West Bank throughout the day. Two Palestinians were shot dead in the morning near the Morag settlement in Gaza.
On Wednesday night, several Israeli tanks moved back into an area of the Khan Younis refugee camp in southern Gaza where some buildings had been razed the day before.
Bassam Abu Sharif, one of Arafat’s advisers, predicted on Wednesday that there would be an increase in bloodshed in the short-term as Palestinians took revenge for Sheikh Yassin. ”What is coming will be very bloody,” he said. ”Bloody acts beget bloody acts.”
Sharif, who masterminded Palestinian plane hijackings in the 1970s and recruited Carlos the Jackal, said at this home in Ramallah that he still expected Hamas to join Fatah in declaring a ceasefire in the conflict once it had satisfied its demand for revenge.
He said Hamas had agreed to take part in a meeting to discuss a ceasefire in Cairo next week. He also predicted that there would be a showdown between Fatah, the secular movement which runs the Palestinian Authority, and Hamas, the Islamist movement. ”Yes, definitely,” he said. ”At the right time.”
He said that Arafat would not embark on tackling Hamas until he was convinced that the US was serious about the peace process.
The chancellor, Gordon Brown, ordered British banks last night to freeze accounts linked to five senior Hamas figures, including the new leader, Abdel Aziz Rantissi, and urged other European Union governments to follow suit. – Guardian Unlimited Â