Suicide bomber motivated by daughter's and friend's death: Relatives

The young Palestinian suicide bomber who blew up a bakery in an Israeli resort today, killing himself and three other people, was unemployed, despondent over the death of a newborn daughter and driven to avenge his best friend’s killing by Israeli troops, relatives said.

Mohammed Siksik’s apparent depression was in contrast to the joyful mood outside his house after his fiery death in the southern Israeli city of Eilat.

Dozens of neighbours celebrated outside the 20-year-old’s house, waving his photo and praising him as a martyr. Inside, his mother greeted mourners with a smile.

“He told me: 'Meeting God is better for me than this whole world',” said Rowayda Siksik, wearing a white veil.

He told her only that he was going to carry out an operation inside Israel, she said. “He said: ’Goodbye, I am going, mother. Forgive me.’ I told him: ’God be with you’.”

Siksik never found steady work, scraping by with occasional jobs with his father, installing tiles. “You can’t find work in this place,” his mother said.

Married just over a year ago, he lost his seven-month-old daughter to a nerve disease, his mother said.

Sitting on the floor of her well-tiled but otherwise bare house, the mother said her son also lost his best friend, Nader Amrein, killed six months ago during an Israeli military operation in northern Gaza. He was from Fatah, the movement of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

As the brother of a top Islamic Jihad official, Siksik made an easy target for recruitment for the suicide attack.

Originally sympathetic to the more secular Fatah, his life changed after the death of his friend. “He became religious about six months ago,” his mother said. “He joined Islamic Jihad.”

Outside his house, Islamic Jihad and Fatah members argued heatedly over who would sponsor his funeral. The two groups claimed to have jointly planned the attack. Islamic Jihad said Siksik made it into Israel through Jordan, but Jordan’s government disputed that.

Israeli officials say he infiltrated through Egypt, which has a long, largely unguarded desert border with Israel.

Islamic Jihad insisted he did not pass through the often-closed Rafah crossing into Egypt – Gazans’ only gateway to the outside world without passing through Israel.

Siksik’s aunt, Najwa Siksik, said the young man spoke to her a week ago about how Palestinians infiltrate into Israel under the pretext of looking for work, but she tried to get him to change his mind about sneaking into Israel, even for work, “because people get caught and killed. He just shook his head.”

It was the first suicide attack in Israel in nine months and the first ever to hit Eilat, Israel’s southern-most city.

Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Israel would press ahead with action against militants following the Eilat bombing, but he stopped short of ordering retaliation.

Israel’s Defence Minister Amir Peretz denounced the suicide bombing as an “escalation” that threatened a recent ceasefire, and promised to take all “necessary” steps to prevent similar attacks.