LONDON — Scores of Palestinian women have responded to a religious decree issued by the High Islamic Council in Saudi Arabia last week to become suicide bombers, according to Sunday’s London Sunday Times.
The first woman was caught during an abortive attack at the central bus station in Tel Aviv last Friday, and according to Israeli security sources quoted by the paper, many more are likely to follow her example.
The paper quoted Israeli-Arab spiritual leader Sheikh Abdullah Nimr Darwish as saying that “Israel has issued a death warrant against the Palestinians,” and that it was reasonable to expect women to join the struggle.
“The women, too, will fight,” he said. “Now the Palestinians prefer to be killed at the front rather than wait and be killed at home.”
He spoke of seeing Palestinian women wearing white shrouds at funerals — a sign of their readiness to become a shuhada, or martyr. He added: “Israel has the Dimona nuclear plant, but we Palestinians have a stronger Dimona, the suiciders. We can use them on a daily basis.”
The paper also quoted Palestinian security sources who described how the women shouted in exultation: “Make a bomb of me, please!”
The decision to involve women has been the subject of heated debate among Islamic leaders, but Israel’s July 31 attack on Hamas terrorists in Nablus, which killed six, including two children, is said to have changed the mood.
In another development, the London-based Sunday Telegraph reported that leading Arab intellectuals are calling on Palestinian women to join the war against Israel as “biological weapons.” Noting that the Palestinian birth rate is outpacing that of the Jewish population, they see the best hopes of a Palestinian victory against Israel through demography rather than violence.
Population projections presented recently to the Knesset indicate that Arabs will outnumber Jews within the Green Line by 2035 and that there are already as many Arabs as Jews when the West Bank and Gaza Strip are included.
Writing recently in the London-based Arabic daily al-Hayat, Egyptian intellectual Dr. Wahid Magid suggested that “the way to end the Arab-Israel conflict is through changing the demographic balance within the Green Line.
“It will not be long before the Arabs become the supreme decision-makers who will control the conflict.”