aiming to die.

• Author: FINKEL, MICHAEL

Why do so many young Palestinians want to become martyrs? A report from behind the lines.

a little before noon on the last day of his life, 15-year-old Ahmed Abutayeh invented a toothache. This was the first time he had ever complained of a health problem in school, so his science teacher wrote him a permission slip to visit a nearby clinic. Ahmed shouldered his plaid book bag and walked out onto the chaotic streets of Beach Camp, a refugee settlement where 75,000 Palestinians are corralled into a half-square-mile block, at the northern end of the Gaza Strip. It was November 1, last fall. The previous day, Ahmed had sold his pet nightingale for a few shekels, and now, carrying this money, he caught a taxi and asked to be driven to a checkpoint called Karni Crossing. On the outside of his book bag, in blue ink, he had inscribed a four-word epitaph: "The Martyr Ahmed Abutayeh."

At Karni Crossing, Ahmed joined at least a hundred other Palestinians, all of them male and many of them, like Ahmed, school age. In dirt trenches and behind cement barricades, they crouched, armed with stones and Molotov cocktails. On the other side of the crossing, which separates the occupied territory of Gaza from Israel proper, the Israeli Army had placed a tank and two armored vehicles.

Palestinians are not allowed through Karni Crossing. The road is reserved for access to an Israeli settlement in the Gaza Strip called Netzarim. Forty percent of the Gaza Strip's land is controlled by Israel and is home to an estimated 6,500 Israeli settlers. The other 60 percent is home to more than a million Palestinians, half of whom laid book bag and walked out live in refugee camps. After the peace process fell apart in September, Karni Crossing became the site of daily battles between Palestinian youths and Israeli soldiers.

Ahmed unlimbered his sling, cupping a stone in its denim pouch. Again and again, he twirled the sling about his head, then snapped the line taut. Sometime around four o'clock, two carloads of settlers wanted to drive through. The Palestinian boys kept throwing stones. Live ammunition was fired from the Israeli side. Many of the boys fled or dived behind barricades, but Ahmed kept standing. He flung another stone. A bullet from an M-16 struck him just above his right ear. The bullet traveled at a downward angle, passed through his head and throat, and settled in his chest. He was dead before an ambulance crew could reach him. The permission slip from his science teacher was found in the front pocket of his blue jeans.

TEENAGE BREAKDOWN

This is a strange war. The rhetoric and politics of the conflict--the claims of religious righteousness, the rights of refugees, and the status of occupied lands--are all cast in the loftiest of ideals. And yet, on the Palestinian side at least, much of the fighting is left to kids. Teenagers and preteenagers and boys as young as 5...