Bomber quit intelligence service to join Hamas two days before attack

The Jerusalem bombers were identified by Israeli and Palestinian sources as Osama Bahar and Nabil Halbiyeh, both in their twenties. The Haifa bomber was Maher Habashi, 21, a plumber from Nablus, recruited by Hamas.

Halbiyeh resigned as an officer in the Palestinian intelligence service two days before the bombings and announced that he was joining Hamas. Israeli security forces raided Abu Dis, the home village of Bahar and Halbiyeh on the eastern fringe of Jerusalem yesterday, and arrested about 10 of their family members and friends.

Habashi's father learnt of his son's fate when Hamas supporters came to congratulate him. His son had been preparing for his wedding. The three brought to 30 the number of Palestinians who have blown themselves up since the intifada broke out 14 months ago.

Extremist Islamic leaders say young Palestinians are lining up by the hundred in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to volunteer for suicide missions. Eyad Sarraj, the director of the Gaza community mental health project, detects a widespread zeal. "If they are turned down," he told The Independent, "they become depressed. They feel they have been deprived of the ultimate award of dying for God."

Palestinian opinion polls show a sharp rise in support for suicide attacks. Before the intifada, it ranged from 20 to 25 per cent. It is now between 70 and 80 per cent.

Dr Sarraj has researched the "martyr syndrome", trying to fathom why so many young Palestinian Muslims want to die. Religion, he concluded, was only part – albeit a crucial part – of the reason. The other components were a need to identify with a symbol of power and a thirst for revenge.

"The bottom line," Dr Sarraj said, "is absolute despair. It's not economic despair, not poverty, but political despair. These people identify with the defeated, humiliated Arab Islamic nation. They can't rely on outside help. So in the end they turn themselves into bombs."

Many children, Dr Sarraj said, had seen the humiliation of their fathers by Israeli soldiers. They no longer admired a father who could not protect them, so they sought an alternative. Dr Sarraj discovered that many Palestinians turned to violence against their own community, but once the second, more violent, intifada broke out, they found a more appealing model in the fighter who kills for his nation.

The question now is whether the cult of the martyr is so entrenched that it will be impossible for Yasser Arafat to rein in the bombers, even if he wants to.