Israelis kill armed Palestinian woman

Sat Apr 4, 2009 8:50am EDT Email | Print | Share| Reprints | Single Page<-> Text <+>
By Nidal al-Mughrabi

GAZA (Reuters) - Israeli forces killed a Palestinian woman who shot at a police base in southern Israel Saturday, and two militants in a separate incident in the Gaza Strip, medics and Israeli security official said.

In a rare incident, the woman opened fire at a guardpost at the Israeli base, and was gunned down by police there, the Israeli official said. There were no Israeli casualties.

The woman had been armed with a pistol and a bomb that police were defusing, the official added.

There were no immediate claims of responsibility for the incident nor was it clear whether the woman was an Israeli Arab citizen, most of whom are of Palestinian origin, or a Palestinian from occupied territory who had infiltrated the frontier.

<snip>

http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSL454598520090404

Basma Awad al-Nabari of the nearby Houra village. Police believe she acted independently and had no ties to Palestinian terror groups. "

yet is believed to have acted independently. I'm wondering where she got the gun, and what motivated her to basically end her own life there.

I doubt you will see much follow up here, though

many who have been both have never committed such an act. So, it was probably something other than your cliched knee jerk reaction. Third, acting as an apologist for a violent individual serves no one except other violent individuals.

Did I say that "all people" act a certain way? No. I said people act irrationally, which they do, certainly when they are hungry and have seen death all around them. To deny that this woman was traumatized is to deny the problem, which is what Israeli apologists like you love to do.

this kid was hungry or saw death all around her. She was an Israeli citizen. That doesn't mean that she didn't suffer from prejudice and that the toll of the strife wasn't high, but she didn't suffer from the occupation in a direct way.

and then goes on to say that the police don't know whether she is an Israeli or Palestinian living in the territories, I came away with the impression she was from Gaza...

I truly hate it whenever people say stuff like "To deny that this woman was traumatized is to deny the problem, which is what Israeli apologists like you love to do." Yeah, because anyone who defends any Israeli policies is an "apologist" who loves to try and deny human rights to Palestinians because they likely don't even see them as fully human, right? I love how you voiced offense at the suggestion that you painted "all people" with a broad brush only to then inform us what "Israeli apologists love to do" immediately afterwords.

Of course, this whole argument is rendered somewhat impotent by the fact that this woman turned out to not have been traumatized at all, which was exactly the fact that Sezu had been saying should be verified! "To deny that this woman was traumatized is to deny the problem" oh my lord... when did it become such an awful thing to insist on knowing the facts before passing judgment?

So now that we know that the woman WASN'T traumatized does your ultimatum still apply? And do you see how by making those kinds of statements the conversation has been derailed from a substantial subject to an insignificant one?

To deny that this woman was traumatized is to deny the problem, which is what Israeli apologists like you love to do.

Seriously, how can you make these kinds of statements without having ANY idea if the woman was traumatized yourself? "If you fail to believe this specific thing regardless of the evidence at hand then you are denying that any kind of problem exists at all. Which is what you apologists are all trying to do anyway!"

I mean, SERIOUSLY? How dare you, dude.

Seeing as how this article was written apparently in Gaza and no where in it does it say she was otherwise.

Gazans are traumatized and most of them are starved, is that not true?

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You disgrace yourself yet again

First of all, without knowing much about the situation at all your initial response was to offer an explanation that shifts responsibility on to the Israelis. In a conflict such as this one we could easily use such reasoning to explain the majority of violent actions from either side. To respond to any individual event with a knee jerk response, "Well, but this happened because of how x has been acting towards y" is intellectually lazy and represents a dangerous way of thinking about the conflict in general. While I realize that none of these events occur in a vacuum, the urge to rely on apparent motivations to explain away every action isn't intellectually honest or helpful. Especially when doing so requires relying on assumptions to fill in the factual gaps. (Assumptions you made which ended up being incorrect.)

That said, your assumption itself, "People act irrationally when they have been starved and bombed." is itself flawed. The vast majority of terrorism is not committed by people who are the most oppressed themselves but by sympathetic kin who do it for ideological reasons. Terrorists rarely fit the stereotype of being people who have nothing left to lose or people who have been driven crazy by the oppression they have endured.

Throughout history a great many people have endured situations far more severe than those present in Gaza. I don't say this to minimize the suffering of the people there but merely to make a point about people's reactions. If a person from sderot were to act similarly would you immediately offer up the explanation that the rockets caused him to take leave of his senses?

Besides, this girl was not even Gazan. She was an Israeli Arab who had been neither starved nor bombed.


edit: I just read the link to her writing and it seems that her motivations fit very well with the standard MO that I described above. She wasn't acting irrationally due to being bombed or starved, she was seeking revenge on behalf of her comrades in Gaza. Do you see why it is so problematic to play "fill in the blanks" with assumptions that reinforce your own personal view of the conflict?

There has to be a back story here.

<snip>

"The Israel Police revealed late Saturday that they had found in the notebooks of 15-year-old Basma Awad al-Nabari, the 9th grader who was killed during a foiled shooting attack at a Border Police base in the Negev, writing indicating that she had planned to avenge Israel's offensive in the Gaza Strip.

Al-Nabari, a Bedouin girl from a nearby village, had opened fire on a Border Police barracks at Shoket Junction in the south.

The girl arrived at Shoket Junction shortly before 2 P.M. and walked toward the main gate of the base. When she tried to fire on the sentry from a distance of a few meters, he turned the barrel away and escaped the bullets. She then ran away and took cover, while the sentry and another officer who had arrived at the scene tried to persuade her to turn herself in.

When the brief negotiation failed, another gun battle ensued, at the end of which the officer shot the attacker dead.

According to investigators, police found letters among the attacker's books in which she had written that she wanted to become a Shahid, or martyr, and that the aim of the shooting was to avenge the offenses committed by Israel's security establishment against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank."

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1076510.html

Words fail.

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by and large the snide and flippant 72 virgins comment is about as bigoted as any biased comment using stock slurs about jews. In this case, against a 15 year old girl, it's particularly hateful and offensive. And don't bother with the crap about how I must support what she did. I feel what she did was the tragic result of this ongoing strife- and not just the occupation, as obviously didn't live in the OT.

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will be interesting to learn what she actually wrote.

The police also introduced al-Nabari's diary as evidence,
in which she had written that she wants to be a "shahida" (martyr) because of what the Palestinians experienced during the Israeli offensive in Gaza.

"It's raining enemy missiles," she wrote, "And I can hear the screams of Gaza echo in my ears. I have a profound wish to die for Palestine; I have a profound wish to die for Gaza." Other entries include her expressing her wish to "hurt police officers and the enemy," and according the officer Didi's testimony, documents indicating the family's affiliation with Hamas were also found in the house.

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3697570,00.html

about the conspiracy the police are suggesting regarding her family members.

Hopefully more details will follow.

She's now referred to as "16 year old Bedouin Basma Awad al-Nabari". Three members of her grieving family are now being held under "conspiracy" charges.



http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3697570,00.html