JERUSALEM — The boy who wore the bomb said he wanted to be a hero.
He was a poor student, his mother said, never quick in his thinking. And he hardly looked his 16 years as he stood in front of Israeli soldiers, an 18-pound explosives vest strapped around his midsection, surrounded by Palestinians trying to make their way through a checkpoint.
The images of teenager Hussam Abdo, captured by a TV cameraman who happened to be there, illustrated how children have become a central element of the propaganda battle in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
In a matter of hours, there were charges and countercharges about who might have put the boy up to such an act -- a sign of the media war raging between the Israelis and Palestinians. In 3 1/2 years of conflict, the offensive to win international public opinion, a campaign waged through news releases and the Internet, has been as hard fought as the combat on the military and diplomatic fronts.
Israeli officials immediately began calling foreign news reporters to make sure that the story was covered. Abdo's image was broadcast worldwide, even the tears that pooled when he could not immediately free himself from the bomb using a pair of scissors.
The blitz came near the end of a week during which Israel had been criticized around the world for ordering the assassination of Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the wheelchair-bound spiritual leader of the Hamas militant group.
On Thursday, Palestinian and other Arab commentators suggested that the incident of the boy at the border might have been concocted by the Israelis to deflect negative publicity after Yassin's death. The Arab TV channel Al Jazeera on Thursday quoted Palestinian officials who rejected the Israeli story that the boy had been offered 100 Israeli shekels by Palestinian militants to blow himself up.
"We know for sure this is a fabricated story from A to Z," Yaqub Shahin, director of the Palestinian Authority's Information Ministry, told Al Jazeera. "Would you believe that a 13- or 14-year-old would agree to blow himself up for 100 shekels, which he would receive after his death?"
On Thursday morning, Abdo's home in the West Bank city of Nablus was inundated with journalists trying to interview the boy's family. The crowd clearly bewildered his mother, Tamam, 50, who said her son had been acting oddly the day before the incident. She said that, among other things, her son went to the mosque for evening prayers, a rarity for him.
