Martyr Mindset Growing Among Palestinians

Dec. 29, 2002 — -- In the summer of 2001, a 22-year-old Palestinian man walked into a crowded Sbarro pizzeria in downtown Jerusalem and calmly detonated a bomb strapped to his back, killing 15 people — including a 15-year-old Israeli girl — and injuring 130.

The bomber was assisted by Mohammad Daghlas, a 22-year-old college student from the West Bank village of Burqa who provided the bomb involved in the attack. Via a cell phone smuggled into a prison where he's serving a 1,500-year sentence, Daghlas told ABCNEWS he regrets nothing.

"If the Israelis were not committed to killing children, we would be the first to accept this," he said through a translator. "But they are not, so we have to send them a message that their children are not safe if they continue killing our children."

Daghlas, himself, was shot and severely wounded by Israeli soldiers during street demonstrations, something Palestinian psychiatrist Eyad R. El Serraj said is not unusual in the backgrounds of suicide bombers, who he's studied. He says every one of them had a history of trauma as a child. Almost none of them was mentally ill or even suicidal.

"Seeing people killed or injured, having your home demolished, having your landscape destroyed — these are the kinds of traumas Palestinian children have been subjected to," Serraj said. "And from this pool of traumatized children, you have suicide bombers."

According to Serraj, Palestinians — not just the bombers, but society — see themselves as victims of an oppressor who has evicted them from their own land, and who has shamed and humiliated them. He says the suicide bomber acts out of a sense of rage and a desire for revenge.

At Bir Zeit University, a Palestinian college in the occupied West Bank, several students called the suicide killings revenge for what they consider humiliating checkpoints, harsh living conditions and the killing of Palestinian civilians.

"It's the only way to react to such killings," said a student named Katreena. "These people, the soldiers, are killing our children, are killing our men, our women. This is the only way to respond. Killing a civilian is wrong, but what they did to us is wrong. … You have to get revenge."