By Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook, Palestinian Media Watch Bulletin, March 21, 2007
Hamas TV broadcast today a video dramatization of the four-year-old daughter of female suicide bomber Reem Riyashi singing to her dead mother and vowing to follow in her footsteps. The video clip ends as the little girl picks up sticks of explosives from her mother’s drawer.
The Al Aqsa TV children’s program shows a child actress playing the daughter, watching Riyashi preparing the bomb and asking her mother, “Mommy, what are you carrying in your arms instead of me? A toy or a present for me?” She later sees a TV news story about her mother’s suicide mission and death, and realizes her mother had been carrying a bomb.
“Only now, I know what was more precious than us . . . ” she sings of the bomb.
Although she misses her mother, she vows to follow in her footsteps. The video ends as she opens her mother’s drawer and picks up the sticks of explosives her mother had left there.
Background: Reem Riyashi killed four Israelis and wounded seven at the Erez crossing between Gaza and Israel in 2004. She gained the sympathy of the Israeli soldiers at the checkpoint by telling them that she had a metal plate in her leg that would trigger the metal detector. After she was taken to a room to be searched privately, she detonated the bomb hidden under her clothes.
The following is the text of the song that Duha, Reem’s daughter, sings to her mother:
“Mommy, what are you carrying in your arms instead of me?
A toy or a present for me?…
Mommy Reem!
Why did you put on your veil?
Are you going out, Mommy?…
Come back quickly, Mommy
I can’t sleep without you, unless you tell me and Ubaydah a bedtime story.
My mother, my mother,
Me and Ubaydah are awake and waiting for you to come to put us to sleep.
Me and Ubaydah, oh Mommy, still need you to wipe our tears…
Instead of me you carried a bomb in your hands.
Only now, I know what was more precious than us…
May your steps be blessed, and may you be flawless for Jerusalem.
Me and Ubaydah wish we were there with you.
Send greetings to our Messenger and tell him:
‘Duha loves you.’
My love will not be words.
I am following Mommy in her steps.
Oh Mommy, oh Mommy.”
