Tamer Khawireh, 15, ran
home on Sunday and buried his head in his mother's arms.
“They tricked me, they tricked me,” he sobbed repeatedly.
Promising him heaven and limitless virgins, Islamic Jihad recruited Tamer
to be a suicide bomber - the fourth Nablus boy recruited by terrorist
groups and arrested for attempted suicide attacks against Israel in just
the past month.
Like the other boys recently recruited, Khawireh was easily bought – 100
shekels, new clothes, a cell phone and cigarettes. His older brother Raed
caught his brother smoking and using the phone.
“He told us that the armed wing of Islamic Jihad was trying to recruit him
for a suicide mission and that he had retracted and decided to return
home,” Raed said. “They tried to brainwash him, exploiting his young age
and innocence."
Tamer’s father, Massoud Khawireh, called Islamic Jihad to demand an
explanation. He said they apologized, arguing that they mistook the 10th
grader for an 18-year-old.
"People like the sheikh [Ahmed Yassin] make the Palestinians seem like
murders... I worked with Israelis since 1967. I am interested only in
peaceful resistance," said Massoud.
Meanwhile, Knesset Member Natan Sharansky accused the BBC of a “gross
double standard to the Jewish state” that smacks of anti-Semitism for its
coverage of the IDF's arrest of a 16-year-old would-be suicide bomber last
week.
While most news organizations focused on the use of children by
Palestinian terrorist groups, the BBC portrayed the event as “Israel's
cynical manipulation of a Palestinian youngster for propaganda purposes,”
he wrote in a letter to the British news agency.
Sharansky said this "reveals a deep-seated bias against Israel. Only a
total identification with the goals and methods of the Palestinian terror
groups would drive a reporter to paint Israel in such an unflattering
light instead of placing the focus on the bomber and the organization that
recruited him."
The BBC press office declined to answer several questions from The
Jerusalem Post concerning the incident, saying only, "We have received the
letter and are looking into it."
|