When The War Hits Home

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Tzameret's son Idan, 23, is a lieutenant in an army platoon involved in the current incursions in the West Bank. Before he goes on a mission, he calls her cell phone. "I love you very much, Mom," he says, then hangs up. Tzameret, a trained masseuse who practices the Japanese natural healing art of reiki, lights a candle next to Idan's photo and sends out energy to protect him. She draws Sanskrit symbols in the air and puts out telepathic lines to her son. Then she knows he's all right. But the reiki alone doesn't work for her. On her hip, she carries a small .22-cal. Beretta pistol in a black holster. There's a spare clip of tiny bronze bullets with copper tips in her handbag.

GAZA
The Faithful Mourner
Wafa Franji, 40/six children

The day he died, Abdullah Franji, 14, was fasting in accordance with the rule followed by religious Muslims to forswear food on a Thursday. Before dawn that day last November, he sat before his mother to recite the chapter of the Koran his teacher had assigned him to memorize. "If two parties of the believers contend with one another, do ye endeavor to compose the matter between them," he recited, rocking back and forth as an aid to memory. Abdullah stumbled, and Wafa Franji, a teacher of the Koran herself, told him, "It's a little weak, Abdullah." The boy kissed her on the cheek. "This afternoon I'll recite it for you perfectly," he said, and he went off to school.

His friends went to Franji in the early afternoon. One of them pushed Abdullah's bicycle up the sandy alley to her front door in Gaza's poor Sabra neighborhood. They had heard that Abdullah was dead, shot by masked policemen from Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority after he joined a rally by Hamas students that had passed by his school. The policemen fired into the crowd, and Abdullah took a round in the head. But none of Abdullah's friends wanted to be the one to tell Franji that the long battle for power between Arafat and the Islamists had taken the life of her son. They told her only that he was at Shifa Hospital.

Franji found Abdullah laid out in the emergency room. She counted three stitches where doctors had sewn up the hole where the bullet had entered. There was blood all over. Someone had perfumed the boy's body, but she believed his sweet smell was, she later said, "a sign of Abdullah's acceptance by Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, who applies the scent of paradise." Recalling that Abdullah had still been fasting when he died, she says, "He broke his fast with Allah." The boy's family filed a suit against the Palestinian police, but Franji has no hope of justice in Arafat's corrupt legal system. Her comfort is the scent of paradise.