Chicago Tribune | Faces of death
Inside a Palestinian Authority building in Ramallah hangs a poster urging Palestinian mothers to keep their children off the front lines of the intifada against Israel.

Peeking out from amid exhortations for Palestinian statehood, celebrations of Palestinian heroes and condemnations of Israeli military actions, the poster tugs at the heart but also appeals to the mind. The children are our future, the maxim goes, so let us take care.

This cry for calm is barely a whisper amid the cacophony of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, where too often death, not life, is glorified.

Palestinian mothers and fathers are congratulated for having sons who turned themselves into human bombs to kill Israeli civilians. They get payments from Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and pensions from the militant groups that sponsor the bombers.

The Israeli army, meanwhile, has brought the front lines of the intifada into the front yards of Palestinian homes.

Israel defends its military crackdown as a necessary measure to protect Israeli civilians, but rising civilian casualties accompany the sweeping incursions into Palestinian towns, such as Friday's operation in the West Bank city of Nablus.

Arab children are now killed and wounded not just throwing stones at Israeli troops but walking in fields, playing in the street, riding in cars--even, like two weeks ago in the Gaza Strip, sleeping in their beds.

Israel accuses Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and others of sending mixed messages, of telling the world they want peace when they really prefer war. Yet the message that average Palestinians get every day is not so mixed: It is one of armed struggle, of the righteousness of the Palestinian cause, of the glory of martyrdom.

Not just on the walls of Palestinian Authority buildings, but everywhere one looks in the West Bank are homages to suicide bombers.

Like the sad, plaintive sign in the government office in Ramallah, the martyr posters are about promise as well. Many portray the dead with a flock of green birds, a symbol of the Palestinian suicide bombers that is based on a saying by the Prophet Muhammad about martyrs being flown off to paradise.

A shortcut to heaven is how a Palestinian militant once described martyrdom.

"It is very, very near--right in front of our eyes," said a would-be bomber who was arrested by Palestinian police before he could carry out his mission. "It lies beneath the thumb. On the other side of the detonator."
Militant leaders boast that the challenge is not in finding young people willing to strap on a specially tailored belt loaded with explosives, nails and scraps of metal. The challenge is choosing the right candidates among the many who come forward.

"Thousands of young men and women are ready to be blown up," said Rabah Mohanna of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. "This is a new phenomenon. You have no idea how big it is."

Said a Hamas leader: "Those whom we turn away return again and again, pestering us, pleading to be accepted."

A different kind of bombardment--that from Israeli tanks, planes and attack helicopters--also helps fill the ranks of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other brigades of would-be martyrs.

Hamas was dealt a blow when its military leader, Salah Shehadeh, was assassinated last month in Gaza City by a rocket launched from a U.S.-supplied F-16 warplane. But that attack also killed 14 civilians, including nine Palestinian children, and left 150 neighbors of Shehadeh's wounded.

Within hours, Hamas and other militant groups, some of whom reject the notion of ever making peace with Israel, were using the killings to recruit new killers.

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