Islamic Jihad promises heaven to teen recruit.

On Sunday, 15-year-old Tamer Khawireh ran home and buried his head in his mother’s arms. Sobbing, he repeated over and over: “They tricked me, they tricked me.”

Islamic Jihad had recruited Khawireh to be a suicide bomber for martyrdom and limitless virgins thereafter.

Khawireh is one of four Nablus boys recruited by terrorist groups and then arrested for an attempted suicide attack against Israel in the past month. And with the city’s mayor forced out of office by threats, a police force long-since imploded, and a population at best ambivalent about suicide attacks, nothing seems able to hinder the recruitment.

“I want to stay here with you, I want to be part of this life,” cried the boy, as recounted Tuesday by his eldest brother, Raed. An Islamic Jihad religious leader had wooed the youth, captivating him with the prospects of heaven’s rivers of honey and the beautiful women he would find there.

A few hours after Khawireh’s confession to Raed, IDF troops swooped down on the family’s Nablus home, arresting him and another young man. Both remain in Israeli detention.

Like the other boys his age, Khawireh was easily bought. NIS 100, a new set of clothes, a cellphone, and some cigarettes had done the trick. One day Raed caught his brother smoking and using the phone. “I cuffed him and he promised to give the phone back,” said Raed.

“Am I not a rich man?” asked Khawireh’s stunned father, Massoud, on Tuesday, as he passed out pictures of his son to reporters in his upper middle class home.

Good news, right? The 15-year old chose life instead of death in the service of mass murder.

But then the father proceeds to blame Israel:

Massoud said he called Islamic Jihad to demand an explanation. They apologized, lamely arguing that they mistook the gawky 10th grader for an 18-year old. They then promised not to do it again, said Massoud.

He and Raed believe the Islamic Jihad, or collaborators with Israel embedded within the group, fingered his younger son after it became clear that he chose life.

Khawireh’s family called on the Palestinian Authority to launch an investigation to find out who is responsible for recruiting children.

“We discovered the plan only three hours before my brother was supposed to set out on the suicide mission,” Raed said. “It’s clear that he had been manipulated by suspicious elements and people who do not represent the Palestinian resistance.”

I wonder. If his son had decided the other way, and blown himself up in an Israeli restaurant, would the same father have been boasting about his son, the martyr?

From the latest Palestinian opinion poll.

* Wide support for armed attacks: 87% support attacks against Israeli soldiers, 86% support attacks against settlers, and 53% support attacks against Israeli civilians.