Kamal's failed suicide bombing is the attempted attack on a Sbarro restaurant in Hod HaSharon that Kamal recounts in a videotaped jail interview. He intended to kill himself and as many Jews as possible, but a soldier intervened at the restaurant entrance and the bomb's trigger failed. The event is decisive because it turns terrorism from an abstract political label into a contested human explanation: Kamal speaks of revenge, family money, religious justification, public significance, and the desperate wish to force the world to acknowledge Palestinian suffering, while also calling his own intended suicide cruel, selfish, cowardly, and wrong.

Causes and Preparation

Kamal identifies the target as Sbarro's in Hod HaSharon, less than a twenty-minute drive from Dahaisha, the refugee camp where he lived. He links his motive to his family's history. His grandparents had lived in the Arab village of Sylia, three kilometers north of the Jewish city, and were expelled during the Nakba. His grandfather lost his place at Cairo University medical school, became a refugee, worked as a janitor at a Christian school in Ramallah, and died young of what Kamal describes as a broken heart. Kamal therefore approached the attack as revenge for an inherited dispossession rather than as an isolated personal grievance.

The plan was concealed from his parents. Kamal told them that he was going to see Milah, his fiancée in Jenin, although they recognized the change in him: he recited martyr verses before sleep, grew increasingly inflamed with rage, welcomed the brother of the shaheed of Tiberius, and wore a bulky coat in November. They did not stop him. The preparation thus exists in two registers at once: a secret personal journey and a family drama in which his parents understand more than he admits but cannot or do not prevent.

Kamal also rejects a simple religious explanation. He acknowledges that following Sharia and pleasing God may have been a bonus, but says religion was not the central reason. He denies that promises of heavenly virgins motivated him. Instead, he says that Hamas would pay his family enough money perhaps to leave the camp for Ramallah, London, or Detroit. Revenge and material reward belong to the earthly logic of the plan; religious language supplies an additional frame rather than a complete cause.

The Attempt at the Restaurant

The journey took Kamal from a car ride to Ramallah into the trunk of a van, where heat, sweat, fear, and anxiety accompanied his passage into South Tel Aviv. From there he took a public bus. Several people noticed his heavy coat, but this occurred before the great wave of terrorism, and no one stopped him. The decisive encounter came only at the restaurant door, when a passing uniformed soldier noticed him and addressed him as a brother.

The soldier placed a hand on Kamal's shoulder and appeared to offer a beer or a slice of pizza, but the hand moved down Kamal's arm in a frisk. Kamal understood that the soldier was searching him, although the trigger was on the right side and the soldier initially touched the left. Kamal's reflex was to jerk his right hand toward the trigger below his shoulder. The soldier recognized the movement, bear-hugged him, and pulled him away from the restaurant. As they struggled to the ground, the soldier whispered that they would die there but that Kamal would not enter the restaurant.

Kamal managed to reach past the soldier's forearm and pull the trigger. Nothing happened. He pulled again, and nothing happened again. The bomb was a dud. In Kamal's interpretation, God did not want the explosion to occur: God saved the fifty people in the restaurant, the soldier, and Kamal himself. The failed mechanism therefore becomes, in his telling, both a physical accident and a providential interruption, though the testimony never erases the deliberate violence of the intended act.

Meaning, Message, and Moral Reversal

Kamal's most revealing explanation concerns significance. He says that he wanted to live a meaningful life for his people, but poverty and confinement in a muddy, foul-smelling refugee camp made ordinary significance seem unavailable. He could find it only in death: his own death and the deaths of innocents. He knew the restaurant's intended victims were innocent and not the oppressors, yet he imagined their deaths as a message to the world, addressed to America, Russia, China, Egypt, Syria, and Israel. The attack was meant to make distant societies look toward his community and help it.

The planned violence also depended on a media ritual. Kamal explains that would-be attackers record a video statement before departing, describing their goals and imagining that children in China and Muslims in Indonesia will watch it and come to their defense. He calls this belief narcissistic and mad, but also identifies it as the reason for the bombing. Death is treated as communication: the body becomes the delivery system for a political appeal that ordinary life has failed to transmit.

The interview then produces a sharp reversal. Kamal objects when Michal stops translating and insists in English that he had called himself a coward. He says suicide is cruel to the family, selfish, cowardly, and wrong, and insists that this judgment is important. His condemnation does not undo the intended mass murder, but it prevents the event from settling into a single explanatory category. Kamal is at once a would-be killer, a political messenger, a son imagining economic relief for his family, and a prisoner capable of naming the selfishness of the act he attempted.

Discovery and Narrative Consequences

Hannah encounters the event through a small video cassette player that Michal had carried in her backpack. Hannah had interviewed Kamal, while Michal translated both her English questions and his Hebrew answers. The scene is mediated rather than directly witnessed, and Kamal's dramatic delivery is set against Michal's steady, court-like translation. The contrast makes the event an inquiry as much as a recollection: the audience must listen through translation, editing, interruption, and disagreement about what matters.

The recording is shown because Hannah believes it can help her father understand the world around Chaim Lerner and explain the motives behind political violence. Yet Kamal's words also strike close to the family's private history. Hannah cries while watching him and then distinguishes his intended mass killing from her mother's suicide, saying that Mary did not try to take fifty innocent people with her. The failed bombing consequently becomes a measuring device for different forms of self-destruction: it exposes both a moral distinction between suicide and mass murder and the book's wider preoccupation with death as a possible message.

That preoccupation echoes the investigation into Chaim's fall. Hannah studies the dark balcony railing and concludes that Chaim could not have jumped over it with his injured knee, while witnesses remember a voice saying, "Whoops," followed by the sound of the body striking the pavement. Michal and Zehava's wedding-dress receipt records their presence at Rafik's Boutique at 19:00 on May 5, 1983, reinforcing their alibi even as the physical evidence later reveals that Michal pushed Chaim after he attacked her. Against this background, Kamal's account supplies a parallel but inverted problem: in his case, the intended act, motive, and failed mechanism are openly narrated; in Chaim's case, the apparent suicide conceals an assault and an accidental killing.

The event therefore functions as more than background to Kamal's arrest. It tests the language used to classify desperate people as terrorists, cowards, victims, or believers, and it shows how political violence can be built from historical grievance, material deprivation, religious vocabulary, and the hunger for public meaning. Its failure saves the restaurant's fifty potential victims, but the testimony preserves the intended message and passes it into the investigation, where it becomes part of a larger argument about trauma, responsibility, and the dangerous desire to make death speak.