Word: ramallah
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Nine years ago, Muna seduced a 16-year-old Israeli boy over the Internet, luring him into a liaison that resulted in his death. Muna was a 24-year-old Palestinian journalist from the West Bank city of Ramallah when she began trawling Internet chat rooms at about the time of the second intifadeh. She soon found Ofir Rahum, a schoolboy from the Israeli city of Ashkelon. She said she was a newly immigrated Moroccan Jew named Sali, and she soon initiated a sexually charged cyber-relationship. The young man was bedazzled that an older woman was so passionate about...
...confession, Muna described how she met Rahum in Jerusalem on that day in January 2001, took a taxi with him to the northern suburbs and from there drove him in her car to the Palestinian city of Ramallah. The two cities almost touch. Rahum probably didn't know he had left Jerusalem. Muna told police she intended to hold Rahum as a hostage to prod the Israelis to release Palestinian prisoners. But in Ramallah, one of her co-conspirators, Hassan al-Qadi (a "senior armed terror operative," according to Israeli intelligence), allegedly shot the boy dead at point-blank range...
...discovered that he hadn't been at school, they alerted the police. Logging in to the chat room through his computer, Rahum's sister tried contacting Sali, but there was no reply. "I knew about his relationship with the woman, but neither of us knew that she was from Ramallah," said the boy's friend Abergil. "She misled him. He told us that she was from Jerusalem." Israeli police discovered the body of a boy on the outskirts of Ramallah. Israeli intelligence traced Muna's screen name to an Internet café in Ramallah and tracked her down...
...certainly without her consent," he said. But in courthouse interviews, she reportedly told journalists, "I am proud of myself. I am proud of myself." In November 2001, Muna was given a life sentence by an Israeli military court. The gunman, al-Qadi, had been killed in an explosion in Ramallah in April 2001. It was never established whether he had been targeted by the Israelis or was the victim of a bomb he may have been handling at the time...
...Abbas told the Palestine Liberation Organziation (PLO) executive committee that he would not seek re-election in January. The 74-year-old leader, on whom U.S. peace efforts in the Middle East are heavily dependent, reiterated that message later on Thursday in a televised address from his home in Ramallah. "This decision does not at all amount to bargaining or political maneuvering. While I appreciate the views expressed by brothers [in the PLO, who rejected his move], I hope they will understand my wish." (See pictures of heartbreak in the Middle East...