The Salt Lake Tribune · Salt Lake City, UT · 12 December 2000

CP-2000-067

Palestinian Schoolboy Foretold Martyrdom

Teen is revered by Palestinians for fatal attack on Israeli tank; meanwhile, his parents mourn

BY LEE HOCKSTADER, THE WASHINGTON POST

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Transcribed from the clipping

GAZA CITY — The poster boy for Palestinian defiance stood about 5 feet 4 inches in his socks. He might have weighed 100 pounds if he had eaten recently and well, which he rarely did.

He was good at soccer, naughty at school, and before he died — after he was shot in the neck by Israeli troops and left to bleed to death on the battlefield — he told his friends he was intent on becoming a martyr for the Palestinian cause. Faris Odeh got his wish, and then some.

Killed last month, a few weeks shy of his 15th birthday, Faris has been immortalized posthumously by a remarkable photograph. It captured him — short, scrawny and wearing a baggy sweater — rearing back to sling a stone at an Israeli tank perhaps 15 yards away. Now Faris is a Palestinian legend, his valor celebrated in graffiti and wall art. Political parties pay him homage.

Television extols his example. His photograph adorns calendars and posters and has been painted, larger than life, on the walls of refugee camps in the Gaza Strip and on the sides of West Bank office buildings. But at home in Gaza City, where Faris lived with his parents and eight siblings, the hullabaloo strikes a sour chord. His mother, for one, isn't sure she buys it.

How this transcription was made

Date confirmed on the page (masthead-verified).

Context added by this archive

Masthead line reads 'The Salt Lake Tribune WORLD Tuesday, December 12, 2000'; 12 Dec 2000 was a Tuesday, so the date is verified. 'WORLD' is part of the folio line, not a deck. The deck is the single line under the headline. WORTH SHOWING MARIA: the dek says the boy is 'revered by Palestinians for fatal attack on Israeli tank'.

The attack was not fatal to anyone but Faris Odeh; he threw a stone and was shot in the neck. The paper's own body text says so in its first sentence. The headline and dek assign the fatality to the boy's act, and the mother's quotes in column two refuse exactly that reading. This is the only clipping in the batch where a Palestinian parent speaks at length.

The paper spells the boy 'Faris Odeh' and gives his age as a few weeks short of 15; the Columbia Missourian letter on slide 71 calls him 'Fares Odeh, a 13-year-old'; the Los Angeles Times on the same slide calls him '15-year-old Fares Odeh'; the Joel Greenberg dispatch on slide 69 calls him a '14-year-old'. Four American papers, four different renderings of one boy.

Columns three and four were read at page magnification only; columns one and two were transcribed from magnified crops. The right-hand quarter of the clipping is advertisements ('I Lost 43 lbs. Using Hypnosis!' and 'DIVORCE $150'), which are not part of the article.

Cite this clipping

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