Palestinian teenage bombers led remarkably similar lives

The two Palestinian teenage suicide bombers who killed Israelis in separate attacks yesterday lived remarkably parallel lives, but their families said they did not know each other.

Both were 17-years-old, both sold wares on the street and lived a few blocks apart on the same street.

Both left behind equally grotesque bombing scenes less than an hour apart yesterday, killing themselves and one person each in an Israeli town and a West Bank Jewish settlement 11 miles apart.

While neighbours blessed one of the teens as a “martyr”, the mother of the second screamed for revenge against the Islamic militants who sent him to his death.

The bombings were the first since July 7. The summer has been relatively calm thanks to a ceasefire declared by the main Palestinian groups.

Since fighting erupted in September 2000, more than 350 Israelis have been killed in almost 100 Palestinian suicide bomb attacks.

One of the bombers’ victims was Yehezkel Yekutieli, 42, who was buying food to make breakfast for his children. One of the dozen wounded in that attack was reported to be a pregnant woman.

The victim of the second attack was a year older than his assailant: Erez Hershkovitz, 18, had just finished Israeli army basic training.

One bomber, Khamis Gerwan, grew up in a house in an alley in the Askar refugee camp on the edge of the West Bank city of Nablus, and sold shoes on the street.

He became a follower of the Al Aqsa Brigades, a violent wing of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement that claimed responsibility for the bombing.

Today, the Israeli army said it had demolished Gerwan’s home with explosives.

Camp residents said 11 people other than the bomber had lived there. Soldiers also arrested seven people in Nablus overnight, the army said.

Israel’s army routinely destroys homes belonging to the families of suicide bombers and others involved in attacks, a policy intended to deter other would-be attackers.

Gerwan had been missing for a day, his family said. Then came the news: he rigged himself with a bomb and set it off in a supermarket in Rosh Haayin, a dormitory town near Tel Aviv.

The teenager’s mother wailed and neighbours gathered to mourn, but also to celebrate him.

Gerwan was honoured – like other Palestinians who die in this conflict – as a “martyr”.

In contrast, a few houses away, the other family mourned with anger.

Islam Qteishat, a young recruit of the Islamic Hamas group, detonated his explosives at the entrance to the West Bank Jewish settlement of Ariel, not far from his home. Hamas took responsibility for his bombing.

Qteishat’s mother, Yusra, 40, cried out for revenge, but not against Israel, which had killed two Hamas men and another Palestinian in a gun battle near Nablus days earlier. Hamas said that attack was the reason it had carried out the suicide bombing.

Instead, the mother wanted retribution against God and the militants who took in her son and sent him on his grisly mission.

“I will kill whoever dispatched my son,” she screamed, beating her fists against a wall. A decade ago, an older son was shot in the head while throwing stones at Israeli soldiers, leaving him brain damaged.

Qteishat left behind a letter and a photo showing him with a thin beard and holding an assault rifle.

He was a street vendor like Gerwan, selling schoolbooks, pens and notepads.

The boys’ parents said the two did not know each other, though the families both live on Askar Road, which links the refugee camp to the city.

In the letter he left behind, Qteishat apologised to his parents and his brothers. “Do not be sad and forgive me,” he wrote.

The boy’s father, a grocer, said he felt empty. Only days before, he had been talking with his son about the future, in particular about how he could retake the secondary school exams he failed.

“I have lost an important part of my being,” he said, but added, “The Israelis have left our boys no other choice but to turn into fighters.”