Kamal's failed suicide bombing attempt

Kamal's failed suicide bombing attempt is the book's most sustained examination of terrorism as a deliberately constructed message. Kamal intended to detonate himself at a Sbarro restaurant in Hod Hasharon and kill as many Jewish civilians as possible, but a soldier intercepted him before he entered. The bomb did not explode when Kamal pulled its trigger, preventing the deaths of the restaurant's patrons and the soldier who tackled him. In the filmed interview later watched by Judah Loeb, Hannah Loeb, and Michal, Kamal describes the attempt not as a single-minded act of religious devotion but as an unstable mixture of historical grievance, family economics, ideological vocabulary, and the wish to give an insignificant life public meaning.

Planning, Target, and Political Background

Kamal says that the target was Sbarro in Hod Hasharon, a Jewish city less than twenty minutes by car from Dheisheh Refugee Camp, where he lived. He connects the operation to his family's displacement during the Nakba. His grandparents had lived in Sylia, an Arab village near the target, before being expelled; his grandfather lost the chance to attend Cairo University's medical school and later worked as a janitor at a Christian school in Ramallah before dying young of a heart attack that Kamal describes as a broken heart. The intended bombing therefore grew out of a personal genealogy of expulsion, blocked education, refugee poverty, and inherited resentment rather than appearing in the narrative as an isolated eruption.

Before leaving, Kamal concealed the operation from his parents. He told them that he was going to visit Milah, his fiancé in Jenin, even though they understood that something was wrong. They heard him reciting martyr verses before sleep, watched his anger intensify, and noticed his heavy coat on an unusually warm November day. His family also received a new acquaintance described as the brother of the shaheed of Tiberius. When Hannah Loeb asks whether they tried to dissuade him, Kamal answers no. The silence of the household becomes part of the operation's preparation: everyone can read the signs, but no one interrupts the path they indicate.

The Attempt and Its Failure

Kamal recounts traveling first by car to Ramallah and then being smuggled into South Tel Aviv in the trunk of a van. He emerged soaked in sweat from fear, anxiety, and the heat, and continued by public bus. Several passengers looked suspiciously at his bulky coat, but this occurred before terrorism had produced the later wave of public vigilance, and no one stopped him. At the restaurant entrance, a passing uniformed soldier addressed him as a brother, offered to buy him a beer and a slice of pizza, and placed a hand on his shoulder while appearing to frisk him.

The soldier initially touched Kamal's left side, while the bomb's trigger was on the right. Kamal's reflex was immediate: his right hand jerked toward the trigger beneath his shoulder. The soldier understood what he was doing, seized him in a bear hug, and dragged him away from the restaurant. Kamal struggled, but also admits that he was weak compared with the soldier. As they fell, the soldier whispered that they would both die there but that Kamal would not enter the restaurant. Kamal reached past the soldier's thick forearm, found the trigger, and pulled it. Nothing happened. He pulled again. The bomb was a dud.

Kamal interprets the failure through providence, saying that God did not want the explosion and had saved the restaurant's fifty people, the soldier, and Kamal himself. The statement is deliberately double-edged. It preserves a religious explanation for the outcome while also recording the concrete human intervention that made the failure possible: a soldier's observation, physical strength, and decision to pull the attacker away from the civilians. The attempted mass murder is therefore interrupted not by an abstract miracle alone but by bodies, timing, suspicion, and a malfunctioning device.

Motives Beyond Martyrdom

Kamal acknowledges revenge as a motive but rejects the idea that religion alone explains what he did. He dismisses the promised virgins of paradise, as well as the associated images of cake, honey, and heavenly reward, as personally unconvincing. More compelling was the money promised to his family by Hamas. He imagines that the payment might allow them to leave the camp for Ramallah, London, or Detroit. The bombing thus joins an ideological act to a material bargain: Kamal's death could be converted into mobility and security for relatives trapped in deprivation.

He also describes religious commitment as, at most, a bonus. He may have been following Sharia, and God might have been pleased, but he insists that religion was not the central reason. The deepest motive was significance. Kamal believes that poverty and life in a muddy, foul-smelling refugee camp have denied him a meaningful existence, leaving death as the only available route to importance. His planned death and the deaths of innocent civilians would become a message to the world: to America, Russia, China, Egypt, Syria, and Israel, demanding that someone help the Palestinians. He knows that the restaurant patrons were not the oppressors, yet he treats their deaths as instruments for reaching a larger audience.

The logic is inseparable from self-consciousness. Kamal explains that prospective attackers record a statement before departing, imagining that children in China, Muslims in Indonesia, and people everywhere will watch it and respond. He calls this belief narcissism and madness, but also identifies it as the reason for the violence. The video is meant to make a private life legible through public destruction. Its desired effect is not only bodily harm; it is recognition, publicity, and the forced conversion of an individual grievance into an international signal.

The Recorded Testimony and Its Narrative Function

Hannah's interview with Kamal survives on a hand-sized video cassette player. Kamal sits on a concrete bench with his hands cuffed in front of him, while Hannah asks questions in English and Michal translates both the questions and the Hebrew answers. Michal's steady, court-like translation contrasts with Kamal's theatrical delivery: he modulates his voice between high and low registers and moves his bound hands in rhythm as though chanting a sacred text. The scene makes the testimony an event about mediation as much as confession. The audience does not encounter Kamal directly; it encounters him through a recording, Hannah's interrogation, and Michal's translation.

The interview also complicates the book's surrounding attempts to explain violence through simplified categories. Kamal's account contains revenge, family reward, Sharia, political despair, and the desire for significance, but none fully absorbs the others. His admission that the victims were innocent prevents the attack from being defended as straightforward retaliation, while his insistence that the violence was a message reveals how civilians become symbols within his reasoning. The dud bomb leaves the intended message materially unrealized, yet the testimony itself becomes a successful transmission of the motives and contradictions behind the attempt.

Contrast with Military Violence and Aftermath

Kamal's attempted attack is placed beside the violence experienced and remembered by Israel Defense Forces soldiers. Charlie says that if his service had taken him to Lebanon, he would have found a way to avoid it; in fact, his unit trained in the Negev, patrolled Ramallah and Nablus, never faced combat, and was discharged after the invasion of Southern Lebanon. The contrast establishes that not every soldier's proximity to war becomes direct combat, while the broader narrative later recounts the massacre of civilians at Sabra and Shatila and the killing of two Lebanese boys by Yoav Lerner.

That juxtaposition prevents the bombing from functioning as an isolated moral spectacle. The book places Kamal's intended killing of Jewish civilians within a landscape where civilians are repeatedly made vulnerable by military action, allied atrocities, retaliation, and competing claims of self-defense. The attempted bombing fails, but its aftermath remains ethically active: it forces the investigators and readers to distinguish between explanation and justification, between a political grievance and the deliberate targeting of innocents, and between the human causes of violence and the language used to excuse it. Kamal survives to describe the act, while the people he intended to kill survive because the soldier intervened and the device failed. The resulting story is therefore not a martyrdom narrative but a failed performance of death whose most consequential residue is testimony.