The paramedic who became another 'martyr' for Palestine

Early on Sunday, Wafa Idris, a Palestinian divorcee known for her vivacious manner, gave some chocolate and a pair of toy earrings to Milana, her four-year-old niece. Then she hurriedly left home, saying she was late for work.

As she set off, weaving through the narrow alleys of al-Amari, the West Bank refugee camp where she lived for her 28 years, her relatives assumed she was planning to spend another day as a volunteer medic with the Red Crescent ambulance service.

The family had no inkling that she was on a mission to kill and maim Israeli civilians, and would not return.

"I never thought she would do this," said her sister-in-law Wisam Idris, 25, as she mourned with a group of other women yesterday. Wisam's sister, Maanal, 29, agreed: "She was a laughing, happy woman who was always telling jokes. She liked life." She worked on the ambulances three or four times a week, often at demonstrations treating youths injured during confrontations with the Israeli army.

At 12.20pm, hours after Mrs Idris had left her house, there was an unusually powerful explosion in West Jerusalem's Jaffa Street. The street, so repeatedly bombed that Israelis now call it ground zero, is six miles from her house, although the main road is blocked by two military checkpoints.

The blast killed an Israeli man, Pinhas Toktaly, 81, injured scores of others and wrecked surrounding shops. It also killed Mrs Idris. Her body was so badly mangled that Israeli police concluded that she was either delivering a bomb or wearing a belt packed with explosives.

If the latter is true, she was the first female suicide bomber of the 16-month Palestinian intifada. Either way, her death is an alarming measure of the depths to which the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians has sunk: there have been few cases of Arab women found infiltrating Israel on a mission to murder civilians.

More than two days elapsed before the Israeli security services established her identity. Palestinian officials in Ramallah, her home town, promptly confirmed it. Relatives and associates said she was shot by rubber bullets three times during the course of her work for the Palestinian Red Crescent.

Yesterday, posters were being pasted up near her home, declaring her to be a "heroine" of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a militia affiliated to Fatah, the mainstream nationalist movement led by Yasser Arafat. Masked Fatah gunmen were spray-painting graffiti on the walls, glorifying her memory.

Saddam Hussein moved to make her immortal by announcing that a monument would be erected in her honour in Baghdad.

Yet questions remained. What led a young, outgoing, secular woman to become a bomber, willing randomly to kill? Wafa Idris bore few similarities to most Palestinian suicide bombers. They tend to be intensely devout, educated in Islamic affairs and driven less by poverty than by nationalist and religious zeal. They belong to the military wings of Hamas or Islamic Jihad.

She was Westernised ­ photographed in sleeveless dresses and make-up ­ poor and divorced. Several years ago she and her husband, Ahmed, who works in a car wash, agreed to part after 10 years of marriage because she could not have children. One friend said she left him reluctantly, under pressure from his family.

Only recently did her mother, Wafiyeh, 60, noticeshe had begun to change. She started to pray at home and cover her hair with a headscarf. "She always said to me that she wished to be a martyr. I used to argue with her. I said that this would mean I would die after her. She replied, 'No, you will never die, mother'."

Friends and relatives of Palestinian bombers invariably attempt to justify their unjustifiable deeds with accounts of the so-called martyr's anger at Israel's conduct and his spotless character.

Yesterday was no different. Wafa Idris was described as a politically driven woman ­ one friend said she was forced to repeat one school year three times because she spent so much time at demonstrations during the first Palestinian intifada. She was depicted as a social worker who helped deaf children at summer camp; a volunteer carer who took part in a project to paint the home of a single-parent family. Only one associate, who asked not to be named, suggested what she had done was wrong, part of a "farce" in which innocent women and children on both sides were being killed.

But a common theme dominated others. Her mother said she was driven "crazy" by what she saw as a medic, treating youths hit by rubber-coated steel bullets and live ammunition. One of her closest friends, Muna Abed Rabbo, 28, said that about four months ago she had been dispatched to scrape up the remains of a man hit by a tank shell. "She ended up collecting the flesh in a sack. She told me then, 'I want revenge, revenge, revenge'."