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JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Thauriya Hamamreh changed her mind about carrying out a suicide bombing when orders to disguise herself in provocative clothes for the attack in Jerusalem made her do some soul-searching.
The petite, headscarfed 25-year-old Palestinian woman told her story to Israeli journalists from a prison cell where she has been kept since Israeli forces arrested her on May 20.

Hamamreh, a devout Muslim, said her handlers in the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed group linked to President Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction, wanted her to disguise herself as a modern Israeli woman so she would not raise suspicion.

"They wanted me to have my hair loose, wear sun glasses and makeup and tight clothes. I said no because it's against my religion," the Maariv newspaper quoted her on Thursday as telling reporters.

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"They wanted me to have my hair loose, wear sun glasses and makeup and tight clothes. I said no because it's against my religion."

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What does the Koran say? "Thou shalt not wear sunglasses and makeup!" ?

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A day before the planned attack, Hamamreh began pondering the "righteousness" of the task and whether she would be accepted as a martyr in paradise because she volunteered mostly for personal reasons, including feelings of social isolation after being rejected by a man she had hoped to marry.

"I started thinking that I would be killing babies, women and sick people and imagined what it would be like if my family were sitting in a restaurant and someone bombed them," she said.

Hamamreh skipped the transportation that had been arranged to take her from the West Bank city of Nablus to Jerusalem and instead went to her aunt's house in Tulkarm where Israeli troops, acting on intelligence information, arrested her.

If she had gone through with the attack, she would have been part of a growing trend of Palestinian women opting to become suicide bombers in a 20-month-old uprising against occupation.

Four Palestinian women have carried out suicide bombings including Wafa Idrees, a medic whom relatives said wanted to avenge Israel's killing of Palestinians. Idrees's husband had divorced her for not being able to have children.

"They think what they are doing is something that will contribute positively to the liberation of their country," said Palestinian sociologist Nader Said from Bir Zeit University.

"These women are fed up with occupation, it's an everyday ordeal for them and they can do nothing about it."

Idrees killed an 81-year-old man who was on his way to buy paints for his art hobby at a store in Jerusalem in January.

Said said some of the suicide bombers, men and women, were socially isolated -- such as one bomber who suffered from epilepsy -- and were trying to gain social acceptance.

"Many of them feel powerless in all other aspects of their life but now...they can change reality, they can prove to their mothers and fathers and schoolteachers that they are worth something," he told Reuters.

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