Journalist
Suspected woman kamikaze throws wrench in Israel's security profile
  JERUSALEM, Jan 29 (AFP) - Israeli security experts who have spent years carefully compiling profiles of potential suicide bombers have been sent back to the drawing board after what is thought to be the first Palestinian woman to launch a kamikaze attack.

"We have to consider all possibilities," Yarden Vatikai, a spokesman for Defense Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer, said Tuesday.

"There has been a need to update the profile for attackers. They have sometimes been older than we thought, sometimes with children, or even Arab Israelis. Women are now one of the components," Vatikai said.

No group has stepped forward to claim the attack and Israeli police are still not certain the unidentified woman, who was blown apart by the explosive device Sunday, was actually a suicide bomber or accidentally killed by a device she was carrying.

But a police spokesman told AFP "it's being taken into consideration for operational purposes."

"Though women have been accessories to male bombers, or have planted bombs or even stabbed Israeli soldiers in the past, there has never been a woman suicide bomber in the past," the spokesman said.

Meanwhile, Sheikh Hassan Yusef of the militant Islamic group Hamas told AFP: "It is Muslim women's right to fight against occupation and no fatwa (religious decree) forbids them from joining the struggle."

He did not say if Hamas was responsible for the attack in west Jerusalem.

Female border police have begun frisking Palestinian women entering Israel from the Ramallah checkpoint at Aram junction, Palestinian witnesses said Tuesday. "The soldiers searched our school bags," one 15-year-old girl told AFP after she crossed into Israel-controlled territory to go to school.

Another woman was taken out of a car at Qalandiya checkpoint near Ramallah and sent back by soldiers, although she had an ID card for the Jerusalem hospital in which she works, an AFP reporter on the scene said.

"When profiling for recognition of a terrorist, you create an average based on experience," the director of The International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism, Boaz Ganor, told AFP.

"This may be the beginning of a new pattern probably used as one way to execute attacks," he said.

"A woman is a surprise in which male police officers are restricted from carrying out searches," Ganor added.

"Up until now women could move more freely than men through checkpoints because there was no concrete threat to security -- this will change. Women soldiers may also be posted at checkpoints for checks," he said.

"This is a game of cat and mouse where the terrorist uses new tactics to keep a step ahead. Naturally, the terrorists have the advantage," he added.

Early on in the 16-month-old Palestinian uprising, suicide bombers fit a very specific mold: young Palestinian men without a wife or children to support who infiltrated Israel from the Palestinian territories strapped with a belt of explosives.

Israel's security was shocked when suicide candidates sprang up inside the Jewish state itself. Last September, a 48-year-old Arab Israeli from the northern Galilee blew himself up, killing three and wounding 36 at a crowded train station.

Looming Israeli panic over mystery attackers trickling out of social sectors previously thought safe was overshadowed by the September 11 terror attacks on the United States.

But with the kamikaze profile covering so many divergent traits and now adding women into the mix, Israelis are turning a suspicious eye everywhere.

"It's easier to recruit the people than build the bombs," says Vatikai. "That's one of the reasons why you are seeing more shooters lately because it's easier to get them guns."

And while Israel has been capturing militants in an arrest campaign in the Palestinian territories, the attacks on Israeli streets have been fast and furious, with two on the same Jerusalem street in five days despite massive Israeli security.

Securing the border between Israel and the Palestinian territories may be more effective in preventing Palestinian infiltrators than catching the attacker on Israeli streets, Vatikai said.

"We are doing our utmost to secure the seam line between Israel and the territories by putting in more physical barriers like fences and gates," he said.

"But we don't want to build a Berlin Wall or a Great Wall of China, he said. "We are trying to act with the long-term in mind."