[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 63 (Wednesday, April 5, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5271-S5272]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                            HEAVEN CAN WAIT

 Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, recently, the Jerusalem Report had a 
fascinating story about a 15-year-old boy who narrowly missed being 
recruited for a suicide mission.
  It is an important story because of its insight into how people with 
the wrong motivation can cause such horrible and needless tragedy.
  This is a story that ended positively, and the young man, Musa 
Ziyada, hopes to become a physician. I hope he will, and I wish him the 
best.
  I ask that the Jerusalem Post story be printed in the Record at this 
point.
  The story follows:

                            Heaven Can Wait

       Musa Ziyada arrives for our meeting late. The 15-year-old 
     schoolboy had come home from classes and fallen asleep. Still 
     rubbing his huge almond eyes and yawning occasionally, he 
     finally shuffles into his father's office at 3 in the 
     afternoon in the Rimal district of Gaza city and takes a seat 
     across the table.
       It's a wonder he's here at all. On the fifteenth day of 
     Ramadan (or February 14), the anniversary in the Muslim 
     calendar of the 1994 Hebron massacre, Musa, an intelligent 
     and earnest Hamas activist, was supposed to have strapped a 
     belt of eight kilograms of TNT around his waste and entered 
     Israel as a human bomb. By blowing himself up along with as 
     many Israelis as he could manage, he was expecting to go 
     directly to heaven; his victim, he says, would go to hell. He 
     was stopped just days before his mission by his alert father 
     and an uncle, who had grown suspicious and handed him over to 
     the Palestinian police.
       ``In the mosque, they told me that martyrdom means 
     paradise, and that the only way to paradise is through 
     martyrdom,'' Musa explains. ``But I thank God that the 
     suicide act didn't happen, because now I'm convinced it's 
     wrong--both from a religious and personal point of view.
       Musa's smooth olive skin and the downy shadow over his 
     upper lip give him a look of innocence that belies the nature 
     of the lethal journey he almost took. Paradise, he says, is a 
     place where he would find ``all the pleasures of life and 
     more.'' A place with no death (``the last station''), full of 
     palaces and gardens flowing with rivers of milk and delicious 
     wine--with the alcohol taken out.
       ``They'' told him that as a martyr, he could gain entry to 
     heaven for 70 relatives and friends, no questions asked. And 
     that 70 virgin brides would await him there. ``Wine and 
     women,'' interjects his father, Hisham, with a hearty laugh. 
     ``That was it! Admit it!'' It's in the Koran. Musa retorts 
     quietly, trying not to look embarrassed.
       ``They'' are two members of the Izz al-Din al-Qassam 
     brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, men in their mid-30s who 
     told Musa he was true martyr material and started to train 
     him. ``They're just ordinary people,'' he says, giving the 
     word `ordinary' a whole new meaning. ``Their main job is to 
     persuade boys of our age to be suicide bombers.'' Asked 
     whether he questioned why the two didn't go themselves, Musa 
     replies: ``I didn't want to argue, just to be convinced.''
       Musa was born in the Bureij refugee camp south of Gaza city 
     in 1980, the fourth of nine children. His father, Hisham, a 
     slim, European-looking man of 43 with blue-green eyes and a 
     loud, ready laugh, hardly looks the part of a parent of a 
     would-be suicide bomber. Sitting in the front office of his 
     family firm, an aluminum window-frame workshop, he is 
     sporting a red polo-neck, black silky jacket, jeans and 
     tartan suspenders.
       Hisham can joke about the experience now, and never misses 
     an opportunity to do so. His son solemnly explains that a 
     suicide bomber who blew himself up in Jerusalem in December 
     but who didn't manage to take any Israelis with him will 
     still go to heaven, because his intentions were ``jihadi.'' 
     But he'll only get 35 virgins, the father gaffaws.
       The Ziyadas are not a religious family, though Musa's 
     mother and grandfather pray as many ordinary Muslims do. But 
     from an early age, Musa was particularly attracted to Islam. 
     At 10, he was a regular at the mosque and was considered 
     something of a prodigy in Koran. By 12, he was a member of 
     Hamas.
       ``Despite his youth, he was given the title of `emir,' or 
     prince, because of his religious proficiency and knowledge of 
     the Koran,'' Hisham relates, with a mixture of pride and 
     bewilderment. ``Musa was trusted. Doctors and engineers used 
     to flock to visit him in our home.'' Musa also loves soccer 
     and played no the mosque team (``a Hamas team--no shorts,'' 
     says Hisham).
       About eight months ago, the family left Bureij and moved to 
     Gaza city's Darraj neighborhood, to be closer to the 
     business. Musa was happy with the move and immediately joined 
     the Izz al-Din al-Qassam mosque near his new home. He came 
     with recommendations form the mosque at Bureij, and quickly 
     became something of a local celebrity.
       When the bombs started exploding, killing dozens of 
     Israelis from Afulah to Tel Aviv's Dizengoff Street, Musa 
     began to talk about martyrdom and heaven. ``He began to 
     mention it more and more,'' says the father. ``When bombs 
     went off, he'd say `Wow, I wish I was that martyr.''' He 
     thought the suicide bombing at the Beit Lid junction in 
     January, which killed 21 Israelis, was excellent. ``Still, we 
     didn't think much of it,'' Hisham says. ``That's how some of 
     the boys in the street talk.''
       It was the winter vacation from school. Musa said he wanted 
     to spend some time at Bureij with his friends and family that 
     he'd left behind there. He was given permission, and after 
     about 10 days, his father traveled down to check up on him. 
     When he heard from Musa's aunt and sisters there that they 
     had hardly seen him, he began to get suspicious.
       One of Hisham's brothers, Samir, is an intelligence officer 
     in the Palestinian police. He was hearing from ``his boys'' 
     in Bureij that Musa had been attending secret sessions in the 
     mosque; he finally came to Hisham and told him he'd better 
     watch his son. The father went to Bureij and made Musa come 
     home.
       Musa, meanwhile, had attended two secret sessions with his 
     Hamas operators. The first, he says, was to tell him he'd 
     been chosen and to get his agreement. ``I wanted to be a 
     martyr but I wasn't a volunteer,'' Musa says. ``They 
     convinced me.''
       The second session was to explain the outline of what he 
     would have to do. ``I wasn't told the location of the attack, 
     but I was told people would help me and be with me all the 
     time, even inside Israel,'' Musa relates. The third session, 
     for the final details, was set for the 13th of Ramadan. He 
     had told his father that he absolutely had to go back to 
     Bureij that day, to help with a Hamas food distribution. But 
     by then, Hisham had made up his mind that Musa was in 
     trouble, and took him to the police.
       ``I was scared,'' Musa recalls. ``The police were very 
     nervous around me at the beginning and I was confused. I 
     didn't know what to say.'' Before he could say much, his 
     interrogators found on him a handwritten will that said it 
     all. In it, Musa had asked forgiveness from his family and 
     wrote that he'd see 70 of his relatives and friends in 
     heaven.
       Musa spent the next week-and-a-half in custody, and was 
     released a few days before the end of the Ramdan feast. At 
     that point, Hamas spokespeople denied Musa's story, and said 
     the police had tortured him into giving a false confession. 
     Musa claims he was beaten by his interrogators (his father 
     vehemently denies it), but says matter-of-factly that, truth 
     aside, Hamas has to defend its interests.
       After months of admonishment from Israel that it has done 
     little to stop Palestinian terrorism, the Palestinian 
     Authority in Gaza is now making efforts, at least to improve 
     its image and impart a sense of goodwill. Yasser Arafat has 
     announced that his police have prevented at least 10 terror 
     attacks recently; and Musa and two other teenage would-be 
     suicide bombers who had changed their minds have been 
     presented to the press in Gaza.
       The Israeli public has been outraged by the recent levels 
     of Palestinian terrorism, and after the Beit Lid attack, 
     Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin predicated a resumption of the 
     autonomy talks with the Palestinians on a serious attempt by 
     Arafat to quell the phenomenon.
       Since then, the Palestinian Authority has announced the 
     establishment of military courts and the Palestinian police 
     have carried out a mini-crackdown on the radical Islamic 
     Jihad, which claimed responsibility for Beit Lid and which is 
     an easier target than the more popular Hamas. The offices of 
     the Islamic Jihad newspaper, Istiqlal, have been closed and 
     several of the radical organization's leaders are in 
     detention.
       The talks have resumed, but there is evidently still a way 
     to go. Brig. Sa'eb al-Ajez, the National Security Forces 
     commander of the northern Gaza Strip, can barely bring 
     himself to accept any Palestinian responsibility for attacks 
     that have taken place outside Gaza, and instead hints at an 
     Israeli hand in the suicide bombings. ``One has to ask how 
     come the bombs used in Dizengoff and Beit Lid were of such 
     high technical quality, when all the ones we've found in Gaza 
     are so crude,'' he tells The Jerusalem Report in an 
     interview. ``How come someone carrying 20 kgs of explosives 
     creates a blast with the force of 50 kgs?''
       He goes on to relate that, according to the Palestinian 
     police, the Beit Lid bombers set out from an area of the Gaza 
     Strip under Israel's control, wearing Israeli army uniforms 
     and driving an Israeli military vehicle. When told that his 
     conspiracy theory would be considered shocking and ridiculous 
     by most 
     [[Page S5272]] Israelis, he replies, ``I'm not accusing 
     anyone, I'll leave it up to the reader to decide.''
       But at the same time, he tells of the exchange of 
     information taking place between Israelis and Palestinians on 
     the military liaison committee, which he terms a success. And 
     he himself has been taking part in joint anti-terror training 
     at the sensitive Erez checkpoint and industrial zone at the 
     Strip's northern border with Israel. The training isn't a 
     formal part of the Oslo agreement. ``The need just arose,'' 
     says Ajez. ``It's in our interest. We need to protect the 
     Erez area, for the sake of our economy.''
       What's more, Palestinians argue, they are better positioned 
     to police the Gaza Strip than the Israelis could ever have 
     been. ``We know our people,'' says Brig. Ajez. ``From the 
     first glance we can tell things about them that the Israelis 
     can't. The Palestinian police have only been in Gaza for a 
     matter of months. In another five or six months,'' he 
     declares, ``we'll control the whole area. We'll even know who 
     is blinking and who is not.''
       Says another police source, who works in the southern half 
     of the Strip: ``Believe me, when we are on a case, we do a 
     hundred times what the Israelis used to do. We arrest many 
     more people, because we know who they are.''
       Musa's father Hisham stresses his abhorrence of terrorism. 
     ``I want you to explain in your magazine that we are 
     completely against these attacks and are doing our best to 
     stop them.'' But asked whether he'd have turned Musa in to 
     the Israelis had they still been in control of Gaza, he 
     replies, ``Of course not, I'd have been a collaborator! I'd 
     just have kept him at home myself. But many people support 
     the Palestinian Authority, like me, and will help for no 
     money.''
       Musa has now been persuaded by his father, and an Islamic 
     authority he went to for a second opinion, that it is un-
     Islamic to appoint the time of one's own death. Musa says he 
     still wants to be a martyr, preferably dying for the cause, 
     ``but not in a suicide attack.''
       He expresses no remorse about the fact that he planned to 
     kill as many Israeli bystanders as possible in the process, 
     and says he still supports Hamas's religious and political 
     program. Despite having been saved from the jaws of death, he 
     says he is not angry at Hamas, ``but I may argue with them 
     now.'' At times a little sheepish in front of his father, he 
     comes across as little more than a teen rebel, if a 
     potentially murderous one. He's not too religious to shake a 
     woman's hand, and when an electronic pager goes off in the 
     room, he asks if it's a Gameboy.
       When he grows up, Musa says, he wants to be a doctor. ``To 
     heal people?'' this reporter asks, incredulous after hearing 
     the tale of heaven and hell, of eternal life, death and 
     destruction, ``Yes,'' Musa replies quietly, ``to heal 
     people.''
     

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