Rachel Levy
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Rachel Levy (Hebrew: רחל לוי) was killed at age 17 on March 29, 2002 when Ayat al-Akhras, a teenage Palestinian female suicide bomber, wearing a belt of explosives around her waist, blew herself up at the entrance to a supermarket in Jerusalem's Kiryat Hayovel neighborhood on March 29, 2002. [1]. The killings gained widespread international attention due to the suicide bomber's age and gender and the fact that one of the two Israeli dead was a girl of nearly identical age as the bomber. The killings led U.S. President George W. Bush to observe: “When an 18-year-old Palestinian girl is induced to blow herself up and in the process kills a 17-year-old Israeli girl, the future itself is dying, the future of the Palestinian people and the future of the Israeli people.”[2]
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[edit] Childhood and family background
According to an account by Newsweek journalist Joshua Hammer[3], Rachel Levy was born in Israel but spent the early years of her childhood in California in the United States, returning to Israel at the age of eight. As she grew up, the Palestinian uprising had affected her--Hammer writes that "a suicide bomber killed three people in a downtown cafe where Rachel and her friends hung out" and a cousin was killed by a Palestinian sniper [4] less than a month before her own death --but, Hammer writes, she remained apolitical and unafraid. As a child, Rachel went to Fountain Day School in California. She was of Iraqi origin.
[edit] The bombing and the perpetrator
On Friday afternoon, March 29, Rachel Levy was on an errand to buy food for the shabbat meal when she was killed by the explosion set off when a 55 year-old security guard named Haim Smadar attempted to stop Ayat al-Akhras from entering the supermarket. The explosion killed Haim Smadar and Rachel Levy and injured 28 others, but Smadar's actions probably saved the lives of many, as Ayat otherwise could have exploded the device deep inside the crowded market. Ayat was the third female Palestinian suicide bomber and, at an age variously reported between 16 and 18, the youngest. Politically active from an early age, Ayat was reportedly radicalized during the Second Intifada when a next door neighbor was killed by Israeli troops.
The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade claimed responsibility in the press for the act of terrorism. Most commentators and world leaders condemned the act but some Palestinians and Islamic radicals[5], consider Ayat something of a hero figure. Newsweek, CBS and other western media juxtaposed the stories of Ayat and Rachel Levy in ways that infuriated at least one conservative commentator [6].
