Portrait of a Palestinian Fighter

In the early morning of April 5, in the West Bank town of Tubas, an elderly man was milking his goats in his olive grove when he heard the whining of an unmanned drone in the sky. He looked up and saw Israeli special forces emerging from behind some trees on the nearby hillside and from cars with Palestinian plates to surround a small stone house that belonged to his son. ''Jaish, jaish'' (''army, army''), he shouted to his son, and told him to send his wife and daughter down the slope. He did not suggest that his son, Munqas Sawafta, try to escape.

Sawafta had given refuge the day before to five Palestinian fighters, in the midst of Israel's Operation Defensive Shield. ''Would it have been acceptable for the host to run away and leave behind his guests?'' asked the father, in his red kaffiyeh, leaning on his cane. ''It was better he die with dignity than be killed as a collaborator.'' Someone had obviously tipped off the Israelis that the men were hiding in the house and that among them was Qeis Adwan, a 25-year-old Hamas activist, inventive bomb maker, mastermind of several devastating suicide-bomb attacks and charismatic political leader who had risen to the top of Israel's most-wanted list the previous summer.

He had already escaped several attempts to capture or kill him. The Israelis shouted an order to surrender. Sawafta came out the front door while one of the Palestinian fighters slipped out the back, skidding down toward the olive trees, firing his rifle. Both were shot dead. Tanks, helicopters and troops besieged the house. Around midafternoon, after hours of trading gunfire, the Israelis dispatched a neighbor with a white flag, to see if anyone in the house had survived the onslaught. In fact, Qeis Adwan and the three other fighters were still alive and armed. The neighbor told them they had two choices -- surrender or be martyred.

The discussion was brief; they'd never surrender. As an Israeli D-9 armored bulldozer ripped off the front of the house, one of the men had time to scrawl a message in blood on the bedroom wall above a white bed frame: ''Allah-u-Akhbar, Abu Hamza Said, Tulkarm'' (''God is great,'' his name and hometown). By dusk the four men were dead. Adwan was the last to die, shot in the head at close range. The next day, the military wing of Hamas, the Iz al-Din Al Qassam Brigades, issued a statement vowing horrific revenge: ''It will be a new kind of punishment this time, of an unaccustomed type that will shake their entity and destroy its pillars.''

By now, Israeli assassination operations against Palestinians have become as routine as Palestinian suicide bombings. Every terrorist act prompts an Israeli military response or what the Israelis call a ''targeted killing,'' which in turn elicits a murderous Palestinian retaliation -- particularly when the target is a leader of an armed wing like Al Qassam Brigades of Hamas; Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades of Fatah, Arafat's nationalist party; Islamic Jihad; or the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The cycle has been spiraling unabated, with minor truces, for more than eight years, since Hamas launched its first suicide-bombing missions to avenge a massacre by an Israeli settler, Baruch Goldstein.

And it shows no signs of abating: in just the week before this article went to press, Jerusalem suffered two suicide attacks in which 26 were killed and retaliated by killing 2 militants, seizing Palestinian lands and sweeping up thousands of Palestinians. Most Israelis had never heard of Qeis Adwan (pronounced kice ODD-wahn) until he was killed and the newspapers reported his rap sheet: how he masterminded the suicide attacks at the Matza restaurant in Haifa on March 31, two days after the start of Operation Defensive Shield; at a Sbarro restaurant in Jerusalem last August; and on a crowded railway platform in the coastal town of Nahariya the following month.

Altogether, 31 Israelis died in the bombings, and scores more were wounded. To Shin Bet, the Israeli internal security service, Adwan had become one of the most dangerous Palestinian militants, threatening enough to merit a carefully calculated -- and expensive -- assassination plot, right in the middle of the army's first emergency call to war since the invasion of Lebanon in 1982. One morning a few weeks after Adwan's death, I met with a Shin Bet officer in Tel Aviv to find out why Adwan was considered to be so dangerous. ''He had three outstanding characteristics which were catastrophic from our point of view,'' the officer said: his ability to manufacture ever more potent bombs, his logistical imagination in the plotting and execution of the attacks and his leadership potential.

Adwan had emerged as the most popular and inspiring leader of the student union at An Najah National University in Nablus, which is, with 13,000 students, the largest in the West Bank. But he was also a longtime member of Hamas, the virulently anti-Israeli Islamic group. So when the second intifada began, in September 2000, he moved quickly into a more militant role, assuming command responsibility in the northern military wing of Hamas. He not only recruited and dispatched suicide bombers but led attacks against Israeli military positions. He also pushed to improve the Palestinians' crude and so far ineffective Qassam rocket, a homemade weapon with a range of about five miles.

He coordinated military attacks and financial matters for Hamas in the West Bank and Gaza (physical travel between the two is impossible for most Palestinians) and talked with affiliates in other countries. ''He's one of the few who were in touch with Hamas headquarters in Jordan and Syria,'' the Shin Bet officer said. On March 31, two days after Israeli tanks rolled into Ramallah, Adwan produced his deadliest bomb yet and sent it off in an explosives belt with a young man from a village not far from his own. The bomber detonated himself in the Arab-run Matza restaurant, killing 15 and wounding more than 40.

Among the dead -- many of whose bodies were disfigured beyond recognition by fire and shrapnel packed inside the bomb -- were several Israeli Arabs. Listening to the Shin Bet officer's descriptions of Qeis Adwan's Haifa bombing -- ''an outstanding operation,'' ''he learns from his mistakes,'' ''he pulled off a difficult one, a first for Hamas'' -- I had the feeling that he almost admired his adversary in a professional way. But if he did, the feeling was tempered by moral revulsion. ''I've been in this business for 20 years,'' the officer said, ''and I've never encountered such a vicious and cruel terrorist as Qeis Adwan.'' It was an astonishing claim regarding such a young man barely out of college, given the long list of his predecessors -- among them, Yahya Ayyash, the prototype of the Hamas ''engineer'' (typically a bomb maker with an engineering degree) and originator of Hamas's suicide bombers.

The Shin Bet officer shook his head. Ayyash had a family, he said, but Adwan had no personal life whatsoever -- no wife, no interest in his family. He was, he said, a ''terror machine.'' ross the Green Line into the West Bank, and not surprisingly, you find an entirely different portrait of Qeis Adwan. ''Kind,'' ''simple,'' ''flexible,'' ''polite,'' ''diligent,'' ''beloved.'' When I met his mother a few weeks after his death, she said, ''He never carried a gun.'' She was a tall, formidable woman, dressed in black with a white hijab tight around her face. Her eyes shone with pride in Qeis as she showed me a photograph of him crouching next to a snowman. ''He was an angel in a human body,'' she said. ''When he was young, he didn't even like to see insects die.''

One of Qeis's brothers, Nassar, a skinny 22-year-old studying civil engineering, told me he was taking an exam last summer when a friend passed him a newspaper with Qeis's name printed in a list of those most wanted by the Israelis. He raced home from Nablus. ''I opened the door, and Qeis looked at me and knew I knew, and that I wanted a reaction. He said: 'What they're saying is totally untrue. Is it possible I could be responsible for all this?' ''All of us knew it was the death sentence for Qeis,'' Nassar continued. ''In the past, if Israel suspected you, they arrested you.

But in this intifada they send you a rocket.'' The Adwans all agreed -- Qeis was enough politics for one family. Nassar stays out of the limelight at college. Ahmad, Qeis's oldest brother, who sacrificed his dream of attending college to help finance Qeis's studies, is engaged to be married. The family now lives in a modern, airy apartment that Qeis insisted they move into after his graduation. (It was not clear who financed the move, or how.) Until then, Qeis, his four brothers, parents and grandparents had shared one stone room in a crammed alleyway in the old quarter of Jenin, just a five-minute walk from the new place. The domed room is bare and dusty now, except for one relic from Qeis's student days -- an ornate architectural model for a fine arts building at An Najah University.

White and blue and gold, the model sits shining in relief, as if it might offer some clue to Qeis's life, like the golden-hued watercolor he painted for his architecture professor. The watercolor depicts the corner of an old stone house, with a shuttered window and curved stone steps leading to a door shaded in an archway. ''He was so committed to academics and politics,'' his professor said, fingering the sketch, ''I can't imagine what changed him -- if it's true.'' Shin Bet would say that nothing changed him, that he was Hamas and that Hamas is terror. But what forces had converged, I wondered, to transform a promising young architect and student leader into the commander of a regiment of suicide bombers? Qeis Adwan Abu Jabal (Abu Jabal means ''father of the mountain'' and is his family name) was 10 in 1987, when the first intifada exploded throughout Gaza and the West Bank. Streets in his old neighborhood -- the stronghold of the resistance in Jenin during that time -- bear names like Al Mujahedeen, Al Intifada and Yahya Ayyash. Growing up, he saw constant confrontations between the Israeli Army and young stone-throwing Palestinians. He watched the army storm the homes of his neighbors and relatives. His aunt recalled him watching his uncle, who was 16 at the time, getting beaten by Israeli soldiers. His uncle never recovered his mental faculties, she said.

When Qeis wasn't in school, he spent hours at the mosque with his grandfather, a devout man from Siris, a village in the valley between Nablus and Jenin, where the family still has olive orchards. By 12 or 13, one of his friends said, Qeis was a Hamas child, hanging up the group's green flags, pasting up martyrs' posters and throwing stones at the soldiers in the municipal park. Later, he was one of the top students at his high school. He memorized large sections of the Koran and followed, like every Hamas child, the group's motto: ''Allah is its goal, the prophet is its model, the Koran is its constitution, jihad is its path and death for the sake of Allah is its most coveted desire.''

In his last year in high school, he landed in an Israeli prison for 40 days, family members said, on suspicion of belonging to Hamas. (The Shin Bet officer insisted that it was only eight days.) The next year, his parents mustered the money for him to study architectural engineering. Soon after, he lost one of his closest friends and a fellow Hamas activist, Tariq Mansour, who was shot dead in uncertain circumstances at an Israeli checkpoint. And in his second semester, he was hauled off again to prison, this time for six months and by the Palestinian Authority, which had been pressured by Israel to round up Islamic militants after a spate of suicide attacks.

While there, as his friend and the current student leader of An Najah University, Ala'a Hmeidan, put it, he gained ''the ability to sustain pain like a sponge.'' In prison, Qeis forged one of his most important relationships, with Sheikh Jamal Abu al-Haija, a Hamas leader in the Jenin refugee camp. As a child, Qeis listened to his preachings, but it was in prison that their bond was sealed. He became Qeis's spiritual mentor. Qeis gave lessons to Jamal's young children on visiting days. Jamal was the caretaker of the prison's other political detainees. Qeis was his deputy, leading hunger strikes and attending to prisoners' problems. Qeis was on affable terms with everyone, even his jailers, said a cousin and a Fatah officer from his ancestral village. But he was enraged that the Palestinian authorities were detaining political activists without trial.

This was not the free Palestine he had imagined since childhood. The experience intensified both his determination to resist and his belief that ''Islam is the solution'' -- a Hamas slogan. Sacrifice, in whatever form, became the essence of his ideology. A fellow prisoner recalled him reiterating the word like a mantra in every context: ''He said, 'My only concern now is how I can sacrifice myself to stop the oppression in our homeland.''' At An Najah University he found a way. Spread out under the rocky mountains of Nablus, the university is not only the largest but also the most radical in the West Bank.

In the annual student elections -- pitting candidates from student affiliates of all the major Palestinian parties -- the Islamic bloc has won by increasing margins every year since 1995. It's not hard to see why. The Islamic parties are not considered to be corrupt. They don't work for the Palestinian Authority intelligence services, as do many in Arafat's Fatah party. And they have a highly efficient recruitment apparatus. Any time the P.A. rounds up Hamas student activists or the Israelis assassinate a suspected militant (as they did 15 in Nablus in 2001), the Islamic bloc wins more members.

Hamas calls An Najah University ''the nest of the Qassami Brigades,'' the group's military wing, and boasts that the university has produced 11 suicide bombers for the intifada. The day I arrived in mid-May, two Hamas leaders opened an exhibition on the Israeli occupation, and local journalists were being barred from entering the campus.   The administration was eager to avoid a repeat of the scandal last September, when Hamas unveiled an exhibit on the bombing of the Sbarro pizza restaurant in Jerusalem. That attack, which took place at lunch hour at the intersection of Jaffa and King George Streets -- the equivalent of Times Square -- was planned and executed seemingly with malevolent care to produce the maximum carnage.   Qeis's mother, Fatiya, and three of his brothers -- Ahmad, Waseem and Nassar -- outside their home in Jenin.

Packed with nails, the bomb killed 15 people, including 6 children, and wounded 130 more. The Sbarro exhibit was a room-size installation with broken tables splattered with fake blood and body parts, a mannequin of the bomber with a Koran and a rifle and a slogan referring to Hamas's military wing: ''Qassami Pizza is more delicious.'' After a report on Israeli television, the university president's office was bombarded with outraged faxes from around the world. Yasir Arafat promptly had the exhibit shut down. Qeis was on the political scene from his first days in the engineering department in 1996.

 By his junior year, he was so popular that the Palestinian Authority sparked a revolt by detaining him and another student leader just days before the campus elections. Students boycotted classes and went on hunger strikes. Even the Fatah youth candidates railed at the P.A. for corrupting their image -- for making it look as if they had conspired to sabotage Qeis. After three days, the P.A. released the two, and the Islamic bloc won. As the leader of the student union, Qeis advocated ''Islam as a solution,'' not just to fight Israel but to change Palestinian society. He led demonstrations against the Palestinian Authority's crackdowns on Islamic activists.

He visited students in prison and registered them for classes. At this stage, his friends claimed, Qeis often said that as long as the P.A. considered jihad illegal, ''we will delay until a suitable time and focus our priorities elsewhere.'' He closely followed the teachings of Hasan al-Banna, an imam who founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928 and was assassinated in 1949. ''Build the state of Islam in your hearts,'' al-Banna once said in a passage that is often quoted, ''so this will lead to the Islamic state on your land.'' When the student council chose Qeis as its leader, he accepted in divine terms. ''I am mandated by God to help the students,'' he once wrote.

Everywhere I went on the campus, I heard stories of Qeis's efforts to solve students' problems. ''He found my sister housing and lowered her tuition fees,'' a local journalist said. He created a Web site for the student council to connect with students elsewhere in the West Bank and in Gaza. He was the poor students' advocate, collecting funds from rich families to give to the poor, finding them cheap housing, appealing to the administration to lower or waive their fees. He opened a used-book store on campus. Students of every political persuasion sought him out for help with their psychological, financial and academic problems. They affectionately called him Abu (father) Tariq, a name he once gave himself in memory of his high-school friend killed by Israelis.

In the courtyard, he erected a clock tower in the shape of pre-1948 Palestine, to remind students that ''we own all of Palestine,'' said a classmate. It is now called Qeis's or Abu Tariq's Tower. And he brought to the campus the muezzin's call to prayer five times a day. Tensions between the Islamic parties and Fatah were often explosive in Nablus. And yet, his professors said, Qeis always tried to unify the factions and mollify the Palestinian Authority. He was not a fanatic, they insist, but a pragmatist. ''And he was funny,'' Ala'a Hmeidan said. ''This opened all doors for him.'' ''He would have been a great political leader in our history,'' his mother told me.

And that is precisely what had so worried the Shin Bet officer. It was the combination of his engineering and strategic and political talents, the officer said, that ''made him lethal.'' But history and politics intervened in Qeis's destiny. In July 2000, the Camp David summit meeting convened and quickly unraveled, with each side accusing the other of intransigence. Qeis led a campus protest, shouting: ''From Camp David 1979 to Camp David 2000 is all a path of compromises. Our Palestine is from the river to the sea, and we will not give up a grain of soil.''

As his brother Ahmad said: ''Of course he didn't approve of the peace process. We didn't regain a lot of our lands. The lands handed to the Palestinians weren't contiguous. As a Palestinian and Muslim, he argued, he couldn't get to Al Aksa Mosque even once in his life.'' While the mosque is on the Temple Mount in East Jerusalem, and under nominal Palestinian control, Israeli travel restrictions prevent Palestinians outside Jerusalem from getting to the city. In fact, Qeis never made it out of the Nablus-Jenin area. And then on Sept. 29, 2000, Ariel Sharon, who would soon be Israel's prime minister, went to the Temple Mount in a move that enraged the Palestinians.

Two youths standing next to me were wounded. The number of casualties was large beyond expectation. ''I was told that my roommate, Zakariya Kilani, 21, was among the martyrs. He was with me for two years. He was my brother and my friend. He was my body. I could not believe that Zakariya died. I lost my dearest friend. This is the decree of God. He told me at the mosque that he wanted to die as a martyr. Heaven has opened its gates for martyrs. Honestly, though, I was shocked when Zakariya fell a martyr.'' With the violence spreading to every Palestinian city, Israel gambled that a swift military response would crush the uprising. Within five days, 42 Palestinians were dead and about 1,300 wounded. Three Israelis were killed. Qeis was delighted that the confrontation had finally arrived.

Until then, he had obeyed the Palestinian Authority's ban on jihad. Now, with Fatah in the fray, everything was fair game. ''He said this is the true nature of our relations with Israel until the occupation ends,'' one friend told me. Another, Muhammad Hambali, said: ''Qeis began to rethink everything. 'We're giving all these martyrs by means of stones and marchers,' he said. 'We're losers with these methods.' And so he began to develop the new method.'' In retrospect, it looks as if Qeis's life had been one long germination process for the second intifada. He had come of age with Hamas, which was founded in 1987, and in joining Al Qassam Brigades he took the final step to jihad.

Sometime in the fall of 2000, the ''engineers'' of Nablus, the West Bank headquarters of Al Qassam, began educating Qeis in the arts of bomb-making. That December, the first Hamas suicide bomber from An Najah University blew himself up at a roadside cafe packed with soldiers. Days later, Hamed Abu Hejli, a friend of Qeis's on the student council, blew himself up at a bus stop in Netanya. ''It's marvelous,'' Qeis remarked at ceremonies for the two bombers, ''that man sacrifices himself so as to enable his nation to live.''

In May 2001, shortly before his graduation, Qeis noticed a white Subaru pull up outside his building. Three men dressed like Palestinians but looking suspiciously like Israeli special forces stepped out. When one aimed a pistol at Qeis, who was standing in the window, he shouted to the students in the street and ducked under the table. The men jumped back into the Subaru and sped away. After that, said Qeis's friend Muhammad Hambali, Qeis was constantly on the move, and his friends rarely saw him anymore. Before I left An Najah University, I took a tour of the Hamas exhibition of the Israeli occupation. I was curious to see what the university officials had wanted to hide from the local press.

A dropcloth painted like the facade of a gray house with blood dripping down the stones was draped over the building. The exhibition began in a room haunted by taped screams and lined with photographs of the invasion of Nablus, as well as a shot of a house collapsed atop a ponytailed girl. The next gallery reproduced a military internment camp, with photographs of imprisoned students behind fake jail bars. Just ahead of me, dozens of students squeezed through a dark, narrow tunnel and covered their mouths to hide their laughter as they filed past a live model of a militant in fatigues, lying motionless in a sniper's position, defending the Jenin refugee camp.

Rockets made from plastic bottles, painted in gold with the words ''Made in America,'' penetrated a stone wall. A warning sign was tacked over the door to the next room: ''If you have a weak heart or troubles, take care when entering this room.'' There you were greeted by photographs of Palestinian babies torn apart, of bodies charred and chewed up by shrapnel. Next was a scene from paradise -- a photograph of Qeis in military fatigues atop a painted mountain, with an elegy to him as he joins his Hamas comrades. What followed was an homage to Qeis: his graduation project, which was a large model of a tree-lined bus terminal and shopping center planned for downtown Jenin, and photographs of him accepting the student leadership, speaking at a rally and honoring the best students.

On display behind black curtains and a low black scrim were the highlights of his career in Al Qassam -- models of the Sbarro restaurant, the Matza restaurant, posters of the suicide bombers involved in each and a poster with Qeis in the middle flanked by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the founder and leader of Hamas, and Osama bin Laden. At the end, there was a decree: ''After we studied and saw the number of Zionists killed, and in accordance with the rules of Jihad, we decided to grant Qeis Adwan Abu Jabal, born in Jenin, a degree of excellence in martyrism from Yahya Ayyash College with all the rights of this degree.'' It was signed ''Iz al-Din Al Qassam Brigades.''

The exhibit wrapped up in paradise: birds singing amid bouquets of flowers; a sweet aroma of perfume; a life-size dummy of Qeis in a shroud, the jacket he died in draped over it; and a photograph of Qeis and Zakariya Kilani smiling, relaxed, before the intifada. Later, I met up with a student of marketing and advertising called Ali, and his art professor, who said they felt it was time for the silent dissenters -- ''And we're not a small faction,'' Ali said -- to speak out against the suicide bombings. ''In the past, people thought we should leave the extremists alone,'' the art professor said. ''Now it has changed. We should stop them because they are hurting us.''

Then he glanced over his shoulders. ''I want to shout it, but sometimes I am afraid.'' n mid-May, hoping to fill in the remaining mystery of Qeis's life -- the military side -- I paid a visit to his old friend and mentor Sheikh Jamal Abu al-Haija in the Jenin refugee camp. A glossy scorecard of past suicide operations was being passed around the camp, and the guys from Hamas were angry. How could they be last on the list, after Islamic Jihad and Al Aksa Martyrs, especially since their attacks were usually the deadliest? In the exposed third floor of one house, where the facade had been stripped off by an Israeli bulldozer, a poster of Saddam Hussein balanced on a chair.

A local journalist told me that Saddam's money had just arrived for 40 families with destroyed homes -- $25,000 per family, the same amount given to the families of suicide bombers. A retarded boy wandered by spraying perfume over the odor of unseen rotting bodies. ''Give me liberty or give me death'' was scrawled in English on the shard of a wall. Wanted men appeared and disappeared. A fatherly figure, whose destroyed living room is now an open-air porch and meeting point for the homeless, said about an elusive fighter I needed to talk to: ''He can't stay in one place too long.

He's still wanted.'' The fighter, with a pistol in his pants and a face flecked with shrapnel bites and black burned patches, appeared momentarily but then dashed off. Jamal is the wanted man in the camp these days. He's 42, with a kinky gray-and-black beard. His eyelids are so dark that they look as if they were brushed with charcoal. I met him a few weeks earlier, when he was still insisting that he was just a media spokesman and that he had seen Qeis in passing only over the last six months. This time, in his home, Jamal partly lifted the veil, as if he had decided that his days were numbered and that the publicity could only do Hamas good.

The house, like the whole of the Jenin camp, was a damaged martyrs' gallery, decorated with posters of those who bombed the Sbarro and Matza restaurants, as well as of the fighter who led the camp's resistance. Young men wandered in and out all day, each filling in pieces of Qeis's life. ''You see Hamas is now attracting the intellectuals,'' Jamal said with a touch of sarcasm, since most of the young men were studying hard sciences. Indeed, the Hamas militant responsible for the recent Jerusalem bus bombing, 22-year-old Muhammad al-Ghoul, was pursuing a master's degree in Islamic studies from An Najah University. ''Hamas's operations are so painful to the Israelis because they use their scientific capabilities,'' Jamal added.

Qeis himself, in the months leading up to his killing, was concocting ever more lethal explosives. ''He was developing rocket-propelled grenades and Qassam rockets,'' said one of the young men, a computer scientist. Pointing to him, Jamal laughed and said, ''You should replace Qeis.'' The young man shook his head shyly, saying, ''No, no.'' The men clearly loved Jamal and his warm, embracing manner. He sat in his chair rubbing the short nub that remains of his left arm, which he lost March 1, during the first invasion of the Jenin refugee camp. Two school-age boys came home with their red backpacks.

One of them, Jamal's 10-year-old son, Hamzi, said that he was a great admirer of Qeis, who taught him how to do his homework and brought toys for his little sister, Sadjita. ''I told him I want to be like you, a fighter for freedom,'' Hamzi said. Sadjita, who is about 5, piped up and said she wanted to be a martyr when she grows up. Her father said that she told him she's going to meet his martyred friends in paradise, between the mountains. To me, she said, ''I want to meet Qeis in paradise.'' Martyrdom, revenge, jihad, occupation, liberation. The words, the deeds, the aspirations have become so enmeshed that it's impossible to envision a world outside this deadly ring.

Here in Jamal's half-destroyed home, in the destroyed camp, in the besieged city of Jenin, there was the collective sense of resisting the occupiers. But there also was a collective disease born of utter despair, a cult of suicide, of celebrating death as a solution for life. You rarely see posters of singers, athletes or actors in the West Bank anymore. Suicide bombers are the new celebrities and heroes of Palestine. In the evening, Jamal's cellphone rang. It was Zaid Kilani, the brother of Qeis's best friend Zakariya. He's in prison, having partly blown himself up in March 2001, when Israeli special police ambushed him at a checkpoint in Wadi Ara as he was rushing back from Tel Aviv to Jenin with a defective bomb. Zaid's story is a tale of revenge and conversion.

And speaking to him through my translator, I caught a glimpse of the mundane details that make up what these militants and suiciders see as their ''sublime vocation.'' He was leading a directionless, debauched life, he said, until his brother Zakariya was shot dead. ''I went out on the streets with a knife,'' Zaid recalled. ''I wanted to kill any Jew.'' Then he went to Qeis. He asked for his help to avenge his brother's killing. He told Qeis that he wanted to join Al Qassam Brigades. ''Qeis told me, 'I felt you would come to see me.' So he mobilized and prepared me. He rented me an apartment, gave me a pistol and money, 2,000 shekels'' (about $400 today). Zaid became a soldier for Al Qassam and began to change his ways. He started praying, stopped drinking and started thinking seriously about marriage.

''Before Qeis, I had no aim in my life,'' Zaid said quietly. (He is apparently not supposed to have the cellphone in prison.) ''He was the essential element in changing my life. He lightened the road for me and raise d my morality.'' Soon after Zakariya's death, Zaid traveled to Tel Aviv to the Carmel market and stabbed an Israeli officer. Zaid had two assets that were extremely appealing to Qeis. Having worked in various restaurants in Tel Aviv, he knew all the city's shopping centers and streets.

But more important, he had a 20-year-old Russian Jewish girlfriend, Angelica Francesca Yosefov. Zaid wanted to end the relationship and marry a Palestinian woman, but ''Qeis told me: 'No, keep it. You have to use it.' We planned to rent an Israeli apartment in the Russian girl's name and establish a laboratory there to manufacture bombs inside Tel Aviv. Qeis told me we have to do our best to kill at least 200 Jews, me and him.'' Zaid did not aspire to be a suicide bomber. ''How many could I kill in a suicide? Ten? Twenty? I could make much greater losses on the Israeli side by planting explosives.''

But just in case of a slip-up, he carried a pistol, preferring martyrdom to detention. Carrying two sets of explosives, Zaid said he picked up Angelica and went to a restaurant on Allenby Street in Tel Aviv. He left one bomb there and headed to the Dolphinarium, a nightclub where a friend worked as a guard and where, three months later, a suicide bomber would kill 21 and wound more than 100, mostly young people. Zaid slipped inside, dropped off a sack with the second bomb and left.

The detonator was supposed to be activated by a cellphone. ''Suddenly Qeis called me,'' Zaid said. ''The bomb was discovered in the restaurant. It didn't explode. So I went back and took the explosives from the nightclub.'' Zaid said that Israeli investigators told him that there were 36 missed calls registered on the phone detonator of the restaurant bomb. ''I tried to explode it 36 times,'' he exclaims. ''But the explosives had so many technical errors.'' Qeis told him to leave immediately and throw his phone into the sea. ''Unfortunately,'' he said, ''I didn't obey him. It was my fatal mistake.''

The Israelis traced the contact between his cellphone, the detonator in the restaurant and the calls to Qeis. When the Israeli police surrounded him, he used his pistol to detonate the explosives. He lost an eye, a hand and his stomach lining, but his proud achievement, he said, is that he killed an Israeli. He's still in touch with Angelica, who is also in prison. And though he did in fact marry a Palestinian woman -- 10 days before his arrest -- he said he would like to marry Angelica, too, one day.

Why, I asked Zaid, did you choose to blow up the Dolphinarium? ''The only guidelines my Al Qassami colleagues gave me,'' he said, ''were that the bombs must be far away from the schools and kindergartens, far away from the synagogues and far away from the inhabited buildings and universities. I was very close to that site, and I saw those young men and young girls who are drunk. There were a lot of them. So I chose that spot because I'd have the chance to kill a large number of them.'' For the Israelis, Zaid was a boon. He said he tried to keep quiet in the interrogation, but sleep deprivation and injections of some kind of stimulant defeated him.

''I only told them Qeis led me to get the bombs from Mohaned Tahir,'' who is known as Engineer No. 5. The Shin Bet didn't believe him, thinking correctly that the bombs had come from Qeis. And from that moment on, Qeis was a wanted man. Qeis's friends and followers often described him as simple, a word of praise you often hear in Islamic countries. It doesn't mean ignorant, as much as lacking ostentation, plain, pure, fundamental, like the prophet Muhammad. Qeis believed himself to be not only continuing the heroic struggles of the prophet but also following in the footsteps of Sheikh Iz al-Din al-Qassam, after whom Hamas named its military wing.

A Syrian-born imam, al-Qassam organized terrorist cells to kill the British and the Jews in Palestine. He was forced to flee to the mountains around Jenin, where he was killed by the British in 1935. His final, 10-day stand and his execution exalted his life into legend. By the summer of 2001, Qeis was taking refuge in those same mountain villages between Jenin and Nablus where he had harvested olives as a child. There he read the Koran, dispatched martyrs and plotted his operations. I was given a glimpse of that period in Qeis's life from a thin young man with wide, dark eyes and long eyelashes, whom I met in Sheikh Jamal's house on my visit to Jenin.

When the man appeared at the landing, the other men in the room were asked to leave, so as not to see his face. He was one of Qeis's soldiers, trained and inspired by him. We went into the bedroom, where grain was drying on a mat. He drew a curtain over the interior window and began to paint a sketchy picture of Qeis's life underground. He reiterated Qeis's teachings. ''We don't like killing the Jews, but Al Aksa is under the Israeli occupation, and we have to liberate Al Aksa Mosque and all Palestinian lands.''

With each memory of Qeis, a shy smile of a child spread across his face. He recalled bringing a few dates and bread to Qeis to break his Ramadan fast. ''And though it wasn't much, Qeis told me, 'Our aim in this life is not only to eat.' And he took these dates and bread and went to the mountain saying, 'I hope I will take my meal in paradise.''' Qeis knew he could no longer marry on earth, the man said, so he talked instead of marrying the huris (the virgins) in paradise. Shortly after Qeis's name appeared on the wanted list, the young soldier went to warn him.

When the soldier found Qeis in his shelter, he was calmly preparing explosives. The soldier urged Qeis to lie low, but he refused. He planted his bombs on a Jenin bypass road -- one of the special roads built for Israeli settlers and soldiers -- and waited for an Israeli patrol. As soon as the jeep was in view, he detonated his bombs by remote control, killing several soldiers. ''He came back to the shelter. He was happy and smiling, and he told me: 'You see. We are mujahed, and we mustn't be afraid.''' In September 2001, just days before the World Trade Center attack, Muhammad Saker Habashi blew himself up at a train station in the northern coastal town of Nahariya.

He was an Israeli Arab, the first to mount a suicide operation, and his act set a terrifying precedent, given the million Israeli Arabs inside Israel. Moreover, he was 48, with two wives and several children; not the usual profile of a suicide bomber. Qeis, the young man told me, was astonished when Habashi had come to his shelter and said he wanted to be a martyr. ''He said, 'But you're an old man, why?' Habashi answered: 'Every human being has his own aim in this life, and mine is I want to be a martyr. I want to enter paradise.' ''I remember Qeis was touched by his strong words, and he took the explosives belt and told Habashi: 'I will go instead of you. You stay.' Habashi refused.

They had lunch. They sat on the floor and drank coffee. They talked for four hours. Qeis insisted that Habashi take care of his family. Habashi replied: 'The pioneers and martyrs in the beginning of Islam used to leave their families and go to al jihad. They didn't care about their families.' The next day, Habashi walked to the train platform, which was crowded with Israeli soldiers, and blew himself up. Three Israelis were killed, and more than 90 people -- Arabs among them -- were injured.

Qeis maintained his reign as terrorist mastermind throughout the winter and into the spring. Once a prospective architect and engineer and caretaker of students, he was now the caretaker of martyrs and an unrepentant killer, deciding the fates of Palestinians and Israelis alike. Ultimately, he would tell prospective bombers -- who often competed hotly for the chance to carry out attacks -- it makes no difference who is chosen. ''All of us expect to be martyred,'' he said in a taped interview shortly after the Sbarro bombing. ''When the mujahed carries a rifle in one hand and his soul in the other, he knows his destiny is martyrdom.'' He also feels empowered, according to Dr. Iyad Serraj.

A psychiatrist in Gaza, Serraj has been studying the effects of the occupation and resistance on young Palestinians, particularly from the first, unarmed intifada. ''When you join one of these militant organizations, you suddenly have access to guns and grenades and all these symbols of man's power,'' he said. ''This brings back to the children their early traumatic experience and puts them in a position today to say: 'I am not powerless like my father was. I am in control.' Of course there's the element of excitement, being able to play a very serious game of hide-and-seek, of chasing the enemy and risking your life. Take all this and put on it the question of ideological teaching, and you have a new person.''

The last time the young soldier saw Qeis was on April 4. ''Qeis wanted very much to commit a suicide-bomb attack,'' the soldier recalled. ''We used to prepare explosives for the invasions, but the night before the Israelis invaded, he told me to leave the camp immediately, because he didn't want us to lose all our armed men.'' The Israelis believe that Qeis was given instructions from Hamas leaders outside Israel to save himself for future use. The young soldier said, ''I remember Qeis said: 'Scatter yourselves. Work by wisdom. Use your brain. And take care.' He took his M-16 and a belt of explosives that weighed 35 pounds. He insisted that he would never surrender. ''Qeis,'' the soldier said, fidgeting and obviously eager to be on his way, ''is a loss you can't restore.'' At 25, Qeis was finally caught by Israeli special forces. "It's marvelous that man sacrifices himself so as to enable a nation to live," he once said in celebration of the martyrdom of others.

But, he vowed, he will follow in Qeis's path with the other young men who share his spirit of faith and jihad.

I left Jamal at 11 p.m. Three hours later, tanks ground into Jenin while helicopters clattered overhead. Shots rang out here and there. The family I was staying with was accustomed to it by now. The youngest daughter had a thick stack of postcard-size collectors' items, like baseball cards, only these were martyrdom cards. Toubasi, Al Masri, Hamad, Hashem, Tawalbi, she said, dropping one after another on my lap. On television, Al Manar, the Hezbollah station and one of the favorites in the Arab world, flashed a picture of Tawalbi, a leader of Islamic Jihad, who was killed leading the resistance in the Jenin camp. Another daughter crooned at the TV and kissed Tawalbi's image.

The next morning, with the city closed off by Israeli tanks, I returned to Jamal's house. Outside, two children were mocking the speech Arafat made weeks earlier from his compound in Ramallah, which was then surrounded by Israeli tanks. Arafat had said he wanted to be ''a shahid, a shahid, a shahid,'' a martyr. The kids said, ''You say you want to be a shahid, but you're just a traitor, a traitor, a traitor.'' Jamal's home had been dynamited during the night. Wet and charred clothes, furniture, the boys' red schoolbags and a red grenade handle were scattered on the roof in front of his second-floor door.

The clock was stopped at 3:15. His wife, Assma, in her green-and-white veil, was calm as she described a long, surreal night with Israeli forces under the command of a Captain Jamal, a Druze officer who spoke Arabic and knew everything about the family. (The Israeli military was unable to comment by press time.) Assma said she awoke to gunshots and the heat of a fire. She screamed, ''Don't shoot, don't shoot,'' grabbed her children and ran outside. Someone shouted at her, ''Tell anyone inside we're going to burn your house down.'' She wanted her passport and other documents.

Sadjita asked if she could get her toys. Then, according to several Palestinians interviewed separately, and who claim to have witnessed the entire incident, Captain Jamal told them to shut up and summoned each child by name. A soldier put a pistol to 11-year-old Assam's head shouting, ''Where's your father?'' The boy didn't know and was beaten. The same was done to the next son. They took aside Banan, Jamal's 18-year-old daughter, and interrogated her. But her fear had been numbed long ago. Even Sadjita, eating an unripe cherry, said: ''I am very sad because my toys were burned, and they beat my brothers in front of me. But I didn't feel frightened from the army. They don't kill children. Only big people. And God is stronger than them.''

Captain Jamal summoned Assma and offered a deal for her husband. ''We'll put him in prison, not kill him,'' if she would tell him where he was. But she said she didn't know where he was. ''Take my mobile, call him, tell him to come so we won't destroy your house,'' Captain Jamal said, according to Assma. She began prayers to Allah. ''Look,'' she said the captain told her, ''we know there were five young men and a journalist in your house. They stayed until night. Jamal washed, went for prayers and didn't come back. We know what you eat. What you have for lunch, for supper. Not one of our spies was watching you but 20. You have five minutes to decide: where's your husband, or we demolish the house.'' Assma wasn't budging. The five minutes were over. ''Close your ears,'' Captain Jamal shouted.

After the dynamite had been exploded, the Palestinian witnesses said, Captain Jamal told Assma: ''All this army came for your husband, Jamal. We brought 11 military vehicles, tanks, a truck for prisoners. Your husband sends people to blow themselves up and kill our children. We are going to capture him.'' To date, he's still hiding in Jenin somewhere. Assma said she prepares herself and her children every moment for Jamal's death. After this last invasion, she said, ''the spirit of jihad has been planted in the children and women themselves. The hatred gets wider and wider.'' Over the two days I spent in the Jenin camp, I watched and occasionally talked to a 13-year-old girl who was staying with Jamal's family because her house had been destroyed and her father killed.

She had an encyclopedic brain and an uncanny memory. She remembered what I wore in the camp a month before, though we had never met. She remembered conversations with her father from eight years ago and knew what all the politicians were saying or had said. She never smiled and told me that her father wanted her to be a doctor. She said she would prefer to study nuclear physics so she could blow up America. ''When someone comes to fight you in your home, you have to fight him back, isn't that true?'' she asked.

Of course, these are the words of an angry, hurt child. But in the mind of Serraj, the psychiatrist in Gaza, they may express a potentially terrifying illness, the fruits of 15 years of unending violence. ''We have seen the children of the first intifada become suicide bombers,'' he had said. ''You only have to wait and see these children of today, what kind of horror they will bring to the world.'' Elizabeth Rubin writes frequently on the Mideast.

Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company

posted June 30, 2002 / updated 5 October 2007

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