7) The Palestinian Reaction: Suicide-Bombings

Many Palestinians, supported by many people abroad, believe that suicide-bombing attacks against Israeli targets are considered a legal method to resist the occupation, although many civilian victims fall as a result of those attacks. The PHRMG believes all occupied populations have the right to resist the occupation, but this right doesn’t legitimize the killing of civilians. (See the article by Richard Folk and Wiston Burns “Legal Defense for the Uprising” in Harvard’s legal newsletter in Winter 1991)

It is illegal to kill any civilian person under any circumstances. This is a basic principle of human rights. At all times, there has to be a clear distinction between armed fighters and civilians. Civilians should never become targets in any conflict, and this applies to the Palestinian suicide bombings against Israeli targets.

But the question remains: Why does a Palestinian in his twenties, or less, kill himself in a suicide attack? What drives such a young man (or woman) to commit this action? To answer this question we have to understand the Palestinian reality of those young men and women.

-         Is it the poverty that has widely spread in the Palestinian community that motivates the suicide bombers to kill themselves with a few Israelis?

-         Is it the Israeli closure and tight siege on the Palestinian Territories that prevent Palestinians from reaching their destinations and curtail their movement?

-         Is it the feeling of those young men that they can’t finish their education and get a good future career?

-         Is it the motive to kill Israelis because of the unjust Israeli practices of killing and destruction? A suicide bomber could be a close relative or friend of a martyr whom the Israeli Forces killed previously.

-         Or, is it all of the above reasons put together?

There is a suffocating feeling within the Palestinians that they have no future, or no hope for a good and prosperous future. This feeling goes back to long years of suffering and humiliation and disappointment caused by the Israeli Occupation. This feeling is seen and felt every day, and every hour, at the Israeli military checkpoints scattered all over the Palestinian Territories, on which the Israeli soldiers use all means to humiliate the Palestinians, without any respect to age or sex. The Palestinians can only wonder: Where are the principles of human rights, equality and democracy that Western countries talk about all the time?

To See a detailed list of Palestinians who carried out suicide attacks in Israel and the Occupied Territories during the second year of al-Aqsa Intifada (29.09.2001 – 28.09.2002) click here.

The number of Israeli fatalities until 25.09.2002 reached 577, among them164 Israeli killed in the first year, as opposed to 413 in the second.  (According to B’tselem, the Israeli Center for Human Rights).