Paragould Daily Press · Paragould, Arkansas · 21 May 1996

CP-1996-006

Family discusses bombing suspect

The Associated Press, Khan Younis

Transcribed from the clipping

“KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip (AP) — The young man left his family in February, advising his new wife to mind her studies and telling his mother he was going away to work in a plastics factory. Within weeks, a series of suicide bombings shook Israel. On Friday, Hassan Salameh was shot and arrested by Israeli troops in the West Bank — accused by Israel of organizing three bombings this year that killed 43 people and wounded 91. In their home in a squalid Gaza Strip refugee camp near Khan Younis, Salameh’s family members said Sunday that they had no idea about the activities of the devout, hot-tempered 25-year-old — and seemed divided on the wisdom of his ways. Samir Salameh, 33, said he knew his brother was a member of the military wing of the Islamic militant Hamas group, but was still surprised. The family had expected Hassan to ‘settle down and put his life in order,’ he said. Younger brother Mohammed defended Hassan’s actions as ‘a legitimate kind of self-defense’ resulting from ‘years of oppression and injustice.’ Their mother, Khadija Hourani, said she just wanted peace. ‘I don’t want bombings anywhere — here or in Israel. I don’t want people to die,’ she said. Still, she warned that if any harm befell her son during interrogation, ‘worse things will happen — more bloodshed, revenge and killings.’ Salameh was a teenager when the Palestinian uprising against Israel broke out in December 1987. Like many boys, he threw stones at Israeli soldiers. A year later, he was shot in the pelvis and seriously wounded. He spent the next few years in and out of Israeli jails… Salameh entered Gaza illegally in December 1994 and was promptly arrested by Arafat’s security forces and held for five months, Samir Salameh said. ‘They told him they were protecting him from the Israelis because he was wanted by them,’ he said. After his release, he enrolled in a computer course in the mornings and worked in a plastic factory at night. A devout Muslim, he spent most of his free time in mosques teaching children the Koran. Salameh left his mother, six brothers, sister and wife on Feb. 2 after breaking his daylong fast at sunset during the holy Muslim month of Ramadan. ‘He said, “Mother, I’m going away to work in a plastic factory in Gaza and may be away for a while. I don’t want you to worry about me. I may phone you,”’ Hourani said. He told his 18-year-old bride Maryam, to whom he had been married only four months, to concentrate on her high school studies. ‘He said he was going away for work and God willing, will come back soon,’ she said… But, he said of his brother, ‘I wish he had died a martyr and was not arrested.’”

Context added by this archive

The Birmingham Post Herald ran the same dispatch the same day as “Militant’s relatives surprised by his actions,” and kept the mother’s appeal for peace word for word. What it cut was the man: the uprising, the bullet in his pelvis, the Israeli jails, the five months in Arafat’s prison, the Koran classes, the wife of four months. The short version keeps the mother and deletes the son. Both scans are held. This Samir Salameh is a third man of that name in this material and is linked to none of the others.

Cite this item

"Family discusses bombing suspect," Paragould Daily Press, 21 May 1996. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1996-006. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1996-006

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