Jenin, March 9 – A Palestinian man was killed this morning while attempting to attack Israelis with a car bomb, but was unable to drive the vehicle to his selected location. The vehicle he had been provided was a stick-shift transmission and he had only learned to drive automatic. The bomb exploded short of his destination and otherwise caused no damage.
Abdallah El-Fatuh, 22, was on his way out of Jenin toward the nearest IDF roadblock. His handlers in Islamic Jihad had given him a standard transmission 1999 Hyundai Accent, but the Nablus native was apparently too ashamed to admit he was unable to complete his mission for so seemingly silly a reason.
According to Aziz Mansouri, who helped El-Fatuh load the explosives into the vehicle, the would-be bomber claimed he was having trouble getting the car started, whereupon another member of the group turned it on and put the Accent in gear. El-Fatuh drove away, winding the car through Jenin’s streets at a crawl, evidently wary of having to engage the clutch in order to change gears or start again from a standstill. The car eventually came to rest at the bottom of an incline less than a kilometer away from the target roadblock, where El-Fatuh spent a fruitless several minutes trying to restart it before the 75-kilograms of explosives detonated.
El-Fatuh was killed instantly and the Hyundai was gutted; nearby shepherds put out a small brush fire that the explosion had ignited, and began collecting the man’s scattered body parts for eventual burial.
Islamic Jihad publicly mourned El-Fatuh’s death, praising him for his courage and determination; his funeral is scheduled for Monday. Both Islamic Jihad and Hamas have announced mandatory training in manual transmission for all prospective car bombers and those who ferry suicide bombers to their destinations, a move that will set back some operations by at least several weeks.
“We are patient,” said Yahya Rantisi, a Hamas field commander. “We could have decided that from now on we would only steal automatic cars from Israel so we could turn them into bombs, but that would require putting the thieves at greater risk. Once the Zionist pigs and their police noticed the thieves were focusing only on specific models, they could thwart us more easily. This training regimen will give our aspiring martyrs more flexibility, and they will be able to complete what brother El-Fatuh could not.”
A brief telephone survey found elevated levels of smugness among Israelis licensed to drive stick-shift automobiles.
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