When Wafa Idris, a resident of the Al Amari refugee camp in the West Bank, blew herself up on a busy Jerusalem street, killing an elderly Israeli man and wounding dozens of others, the world recoiled from the impact of that blast.
Turning onto the city's main thoroughfare on Jan. 27, the 28-year-old nurse detonated a large explosive charge and with that, Idris entered the annals of the intifada history as the first female Palestinian suicide bomber.
While the Israeli security services confronted a potential new face of the uprising, posters of Idris at 17 wearing a black and white headscarf and proclaiming her the first female Palestinian shahid (martyr) went up on street corners and lampposts across the Palestinian territories.
And even as Israeli security services were rebuilding their profile of potential suicide bombers, a spate of attacks by female Palestinian suicide bombers in recent weeks has reinforced fears among the targets of the bombers — Israeli citizens.
But female suicide bombers are not a new phenomenon. Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant Islamic group, used female bombers during the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, which ended in 2000.
And one of the world's deadliest examples of equality of the sexes have been the fabled Black Tiger units of Sri Lanka's LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) whose victims include heads of state, government officials and civilians.
While Sept. 11 and the recent Middle East suicide bombings have alerted the world to what seems to be a fever of attacks conducted by men — and women — fanatically devoted to their ideals, suicide bombings have been a part of history for centuries.
Muslim communities in parts of India and what is now the Philippines and Indonesia used suicide attacks in the 18th century against European colonizers, and cases of suicide attacks have been recorded as far back as 11th century Persia.
During World War II, the Japanese military perfected the technique of kamikaze pilots — "cherry blossoms" as they were called after the Japanese ideal of evanescent beauty — who aimed their Zero fighter planes at U.S. targets for the love of land and emperor.
Literally translated as "divine wind" in Japanese, kamikazes — like the Palestinian shahids today — were also hailed as heroes in a country battling U.S. air superiority.
Some Palestinians say the tactical justification for Palestinians taking recourse to suicide bombings are the discrepancies of military resources of the two sides, where approximately 75 percent of Washington's $3 billion annual aid to Israel comprises military aid, while Palestinians lack an army or any legitimate access to arms.
"You're talking about thousands of Israeli tanks, F-16 fighters, all the weapons in the world against a few people with no army and few weapons, then yes, Palestinians will do anything to defend their freedom," says Rafeeq Jaber, president of the Illinois-based Islamic Association for Palestine.
According to Hussein Naboulsi, a Beirut-based spokesman for Hezbollah, the militant group widely hailed as the only group to have scored a victory against Israel, Palestinians have a "full and legitimate right to defend themselves."
