"When he came back, he kissed my hands and asked for my blessings," she said. "He was acting very strange."
The mother and other members of her family repeatedly said the teenager was not a bright lad. Tamam Abdo said that on Wednesday morning, her son put on a blue shirt and jeans jacket and left the house for school.
What happened between that time and the moment her son came to be standing in front of the camera is unclear, but Israeli investigators Wednesday arrested three more youths who attended the same school as the teenager.
The events that captivated television viewers were a sequence of shots in which the boy first raised his hands after being stopped by Israeli soldiers at the checkpoint outside Nablus, a hub of Palestinian militant activity. Soldiers had intercepted an 11-year-old boy with a bomb at the same checkpoint last week.
Abdo was ordered to place his hands on top of his head, while soldiers used a robot to pass scissors to him.
After a great deal of difficulty, Abdo cut through the material encasing the bomb, telling the soldiers that he was afraid he might blow himself up. Then, Abdo was ordered to strip to his underwear to prove that he had no more explosives on him.
One of the major questions being asked by Palestinians on Thursday was how a cameraman happened to be at the checkpoint just as the drama was unfolding. Palestinian cameraman Abed Khabeisa, who shot the footage for Associated Press Television News, said he was heading from his home outside Nablus into the city when he arrived at the closed checkpoint.
He said that when he saw what was going on, he got permission from a soldier he knew there to start filming. Asked whether he thought the bomb was genuine, he replied, "Many people have asked me the same thing. I can't say. This is what I saw. Is it real? I don't know."
A local chapter of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade had claimed that it dispatched the youth. But by Thursday, the main group, affiliated with Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction, withdrew the claim when it became clear Palestinians were deeply angered over the apparent use of a teen to attack Israelis. The group later said Israel had staged the incident to discredit the militants.
To Israelis, the case symbolized the savagery of Palestinian attackers. Promoting coverage of the teenager makes it clear "what we're up against," said Gadi Wolfsfeld, professor of political science and communications at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. "The idea that someone would strap a bomb on a [16-year-old boy] -- that's frightening."
