MIDDLE EAST: Several women screaming their desire to emulate the first female Hamas suicide bomber were among the thousands of Palestinians who marched through the streets of Gaza yesterday in a funeral procession for Reem Al-Reyashi, the 22-year-old mother of two who killed four Israelis on Wednesday at the Erez border-crossing from Gaza into Israel, writes David Horovitz in Jerusalem
Other Gazans, however, criticised the bombing, saying it was religiously wrong for a woman to carry out such an attack, and also that it would be likely to provoke Israeli countermeasures.
Israeli security officials were last night quoted as saying that the Hamas leader, Sheikh Yassin, who reversed his previous ban on female suicide bombers to sanction Al-Reyashi's attack, was now "at the top" of a list of potential targets for assassination, and that the so-called "targeted strikes" of Hamas bombing orchestrators might be stepped up in the near future.
"All the women should do it," declared one young woman, clad in black Muslim headdress, as she marched near the bomber's coffin. She added for the benefit of the TV cameras that she would be the first to follow Al-Reyashi's lead. "Just give me the bomb," she pleaded. Killing oneself in such a way, she said, was "just like a wedding".
The Hamas leader, Mohammad al-Zahar, eulogised Al-Reyashi as "more than a hero." This woman, he said, "abandoned her husband and children in order to win paradise". Hamas said it would provide financial assistance for her children, aged three and two.
The four Israeli victims of the bombing, three of them soldiers, were laid to rest yesterday at solemn ceremonies. Tal Or, whose son, Tzur, was one of those killed, said he had warned the staff sergeant never to drop his guard while on duty with Palestinians at the crossing.
"Don't take your eyes off them for a second," he recalled telling the 20-year-old.
In tearful interviews on Israeli TV and radio, he sobbed that he simply could not understand how Al-Reyashi, as a mother of small children, could stoop to such an act. "You're an angel now," he said through tears at his son's graveside.
An initial army decision to reopen the Erez terminal today, where 15,000 Palestinian labourers pass through daily to jobs in Israel, and the adjacent joint Israeli-Palestinian industrial zone, where up to 6,000 Palestinians work alongside Israelis at some 200 factories, was reversed overnight on the recommendation of the Shin Bet intelligence service.
The entire Gaza Strip was sealed off from Israel yesterday, and the Erez crossing will stay closed until Sunday morning. Mr Yair Dayan, chairman of the workers' association at the joint zone, said it was "a different world" from the sadly familiar arena of confrontation, "where we all, Israelis and Palestinians, work together in the best possible way, helping each other and not thinking of politics".
Officials had initially said they wanted to preserve the rare area of such co-operation despite the attack, but ultimately kept the terminal closed while they began to review the lapses in security procedures exploited by the bomber.
Al-Reyashi had claimed that she had a metal plate in her leg that was setting off metal detectors, sobbed that she was desperate to cross into Israel for medical treatment and detonated the explosives belt she was wearing as she was ushered to the side for a body-check by a female soldier.