Over the last few years, women suicide bombers have earned the dubious distinction of appearing more newsworthy than their male counterparts. While investigative reporting on a male suicide bomber is often extensive, coverage of a female suicide bomber seems to result in more widespread media exposure. This may serve as another expression of the prevailing belief that women, unlike men, must have unique and excessively abnormal reasons for committing what is deemed as a distinctly non-feminine act.
The media’s fascination with women suicide bombers is a curious phenomenon. In our contemporary era, one might not expect the excessive attention to...
Is it purely by chance that the phenomenon of Palestinian female suicide bombers occurred only during the height of the second intifada and not at all during the first one? In order to answer this question, two main factors must be considered: developments within the Palestinian national-political arena and gender phenomena in Palestinian society.
It is generally understood that the appearance of the women suicide bombers (shahidat) cannot be separated from the internal national-political developments within the Palestinian public during the nearly thirteen years between the outbreak of the first intifada in December 1987 and the eruption of the al-Aqsa...
On January 27, 2002, a terrorist bomb exploded in the handbag of Wafa Idris, a woman in her late twenties, on Jaffa Street in Jerusalem. The bomb killed Idris herself and an Israeli citizen, and wounded approximately fifty people. Idris, cast by the media as the first female Palestinian terrorist, was not intended to kill herself with her victims, according to the original plan of those who sent her. For some unknown reason, however, the bomb went off unexpectedly.¹ Nonetheless, as part of the suicide terrorist cult that was greatly strengthened in Palestinian society during the al-Aqsa intifada, Idris was...
Female suicide terrorists have consistently attracted abundant media attention. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Israeli and Arab (mostly Palestinian) media have peddled competing versions of reality. In a certain sense, the Israeli version of reality perpetuates the chauvinism in Arab Islamic society, and portrays the female Palestinian suicide terrorist in a relatively sympathetic light, compared with the male suicide terrorist. This narrative portrays her as weak and subject to manipulation by a chauvinist society. As such, it focuses on personal and social aspects, and ignores nationalist motives. The Arab media, on the other hand, develops the feminist dimension, portraying the Palestinian...
In January 2002, Wafa Idris, a young Palestinian woman from the al-Amri refugee camp adjacent to Ramallah, blew herself up on a crowded Jerusalem street. The Israel Defense Forces, Israeli public opinion, and many in the West were taken by surprise, if not outright astounded. Conversely, the Arab press, and to a greater degree the Islamic press, reacted with elated jubilation. “It’s a woman!” cheered al-Sha’ab, an Islamic Egyptian newspaper, in a headline that played on an “It’s a boy!” greeting card announcement for the felicitous birth of a son.¹ Al-Ahram, a leading Egyptian establishment newspaper, saw in Wafa with...
Chechnya’s notorious “Black Widows” have been active since June 7, 2000 when the first Chechen female suicide bombers, Khava Barayeva, cousin of well-known Chechen field commander Arbi Barayev, and Luisa Magomadova drove a truck filled with explosives into the temporary headquarters of an elite OMON (Russian Special Forces) detachment in the village of Alkhan Yurt in Chechnya. The attack resulted in two dead and five wounded. Since then Chechen female terrorists have been involved in twenty-two of the twenty-seven suicide attacks (81 percent of the total number) attributed to Chechen rebels. There were a total of 110 bombers¹ in the...
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) is a secular separatist terrorist organization in Sri Lanka whose goal is the establishment of an independent state of Tamil Eelam. Often considered the most ruthless terrorist organization in the world, the LTTE has used lethal force indiscriminately, and has in fact killed more Tamils (including Tamil politicians and leaders and members of other militant groups) than Sinhalese or the military. The organization has a centralized command structure under the direction of the national leader, Vellupullai Prabhakaran, and encompasses various operational/service wings and units. Each branch of service is divided by gender and...
Following the terrorist strikes that shook the United States on September 11, 2001, the phenomenon of suicide attacks became a topic of particular interest to terrorism analysts, psychologists, government officials, and much of the general public in various regions of the world. Special attention has turned to the use of women as suicide attackers, as it appears to be a broadening trend among Chechen and Palestinian groups.¹
Yet despite the media sensation that it created, the phenomenon of female suicide terror has not earned widespread attention in the academic literature, and to date only a handful of scholarly articles have...
