Suicide Bomber Leaves Family With Questions

What makes a 47-year-old father of eight strap explosives to his waist and blow himself to bits outside a luxury hotel in Jewish West Jerusalem?

That is the question on the minds of Daoud abu Sway’s friends and family. He did not fit the mold of suicide bombers, most of whom are young, single men. He was not a religious fanatic, nor was he especially political.

For reasons known mostly to himself, Abu Sway rose before dawn Wednesday, read from the Koran, said goodbye to his wife and took his bomb into Jerusalem. Something went wrong from an operational perspective--a stroke of luck for his intended Israeli victims. The explosive apparently detonated prematurely as he crossed central Jerusalem’s King David Street.

He killed only himself; the injuries to a handful of nearby Israelis were minor. The force of the blast sent his head flying into a second-floor window of the David Citadel Hotel, severed his legs and splayed them 10 feet apart in the middle of the road.

According to relatives and neighbors, Abu Sway’s motivation was a combination of economic hardship, desperation and anger at Israeli actions against Palestinians. No one expected him to take his grievances this far. That he did so illustrates the depths to which people caught up in this conflict are sinking.

The day after he killed himself, a letter in his handwriting appeared at the doorstep of his simple, three-story family home here in this hillside village just south of Bethlehem.

“To anyone who asks about me, especially my wife and children and brothers . . . I have decided to be a martyr for the sake of God,” the note says. It adds that he carried out the operation on behalf of the radical Islamic Jihad to avenge the killings by Israelis of three cousins and other Palestinians during the past 14 months of Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation.

“Finally,” the note says, “I don’t say goodbye, but I will say: until we meet in the eternal paradise.”

Neither family nor friends knew Abu Sway to have been a militant in the Islamic Jihad. They recall an easygoing, jocular man who tended to wake up to pray in the morning and then go back to sleep. His photo, now plastered on village walls alongside a gallery of “martyrs,” shows a chubby man with a double chin, graying hair and a salt-and-pepper mustache--quite a contrast to the gun-toting youths in most of the other photos.

Abu Sway had worked in construction in Israel, but because of the blockades imposed on West Bank towns by Israeli forces, he had not had steady work for months. The family of 10--the children’s ages range from 9 to 25--relied on the meager earnings of his eldest son, Hamed, who made about $10 a day on the occasional days he got construction work in Bethlehem.

Family members also got by with a falafel stand that Abu Sway recently opened in the front room of his house, plus the sale of cauliflower and other vegetables raised in a small plot of land belonging to the family. Israel had confiscated the rest of his land at the beginning of the uprising, the family said.

On top of the economic hardship, Abu Sway, like many Palestinians, was horrified by Israeli attacks on their brethren. He was transfixed by television images of what he viewed as Israeli belligerence.

Palestinian TV often dedicates endless air time to Palestinian suffering without showing attacks on Israelis; neither side in this conflict is eager to recognize the pain of the other. Their only shared language seems to be the call for revenge.

“Did he need more reason than what the Israelis are doing to us?” asked his wife, Fatma. She was beside herself when she heard the news, she said, but now has adopted a political and religious justification for her husband’s actions. “God will take care of us. . . . Of course I am sad, but I am satisfied that he is in heaven.”

The families of “martyrs” are entitled to several thousand dollars in recompense from Islamic charities and other donors. It is more money than Abu Sway could earn in years.

Others in Abu Sway’s family are still grappling with his decision.

“For a man to leave behind a large family, he has to think 100 times before doing something like this,” said Abu Sway’s brother-in-law, Walid Assad, 30.

Abu Sway probably was recruited by Islamic Jihad at the village mosque in recent months. During the current holy month of Ramadan, some restrictions are eased that allow Palestinians older than 45 to go from Bethlehem to Jerusalem. Abu Sway had started going to Jerusalem on Fridays to pray, and this access would have made him a valuable asset for terrorists.

And that terrifies Israelis and vexes their security forces, who have predicated their system for keeping out suicide bombers on the fact that the average age of the attackers is about 20.

Abu Sway’s family said it felt no remorse for the Israeli civilians killed by suicide bombers. “We don’t feel sad for them,” said eldest son Hamed, 23. “They don’t feel sad for us, so why should we?”

Abu Sway had been talking about getting a visa for Saudi Arabia and going away to work for a couple of years. Now his family believes that was a cover, a way of telegraphing that he would be leaving. He had become unusually cheerful in the last few days, his relatives recalled.

On Tuesday night, he received a telephone call. He wouldn’t say what it was about.

He left the next morning.