By Maha Abdel-Hadi, IOL Palestine correspondent

OCCUPIED NABLUS, January 27 (IslamOnline) - Suad Snuber Gudallah is a normal 46-year-old Palestinian housewife, with five sons and a will strong enough to resist Israel’s incessant aggressions against the Palestinian-ruled areas.

But one day in October 2002, Suad received sad news: her son Ahmed was killed after fierce clashes with Israeli occupation forces.

Ahmed, 24, was killed by the occupation forces after three years of hiding. During that period, his mother would take food and clothes to the place where he was hiding from the random gunfire of the Israeli army.

But launching a manhunt for the “wanted” Palestinians while all their areas are under the grip of the Jewish state was not so difficult a task for the Israeli forces.

But Suad was active, and did not allow herself to wallow in her sorrow. Joining a Palestinian resistance attack on an Israeli outpost in the West Bank city of Nablus seemed appropriate retaliation to her son’s death and the other 2,155 Palestinians killed during the more than two years’ Intifada.

Suad, along with four Palestinian youths, one of whom was another son, last Friday, January 24, opened fire and threw hand grenades at the Israeli military post.

But the Palestinian fighters got out of the operation with two deaths and one injury. Suad was dead and her son seriously injured and abducted by an Israeli patrol to unknown place.

However, Suad’s relatives appeared sad that they would not see her again, but at the same time proud of her unrivaled courage and sense of responsibility for a much larger aim than daily chores in her house: liberating Palestine and expelling the Israeli occupation forces.

“She was a good and patient wife. She was able to stand up to all my financial shortages and keep things going in a warm family atmosphere. We all miss her,” said Mahmoud Gudallah, the husband of the Palestinian female martyr, showing clear signs of grief and pride.

“She was afraid for our lives, but the oppression of the Israeli forces and their perceived tyranny pushed her to sacrifice her own life not only for our sake, but also for every Palestinian wife with sons killed, injured or captivated. She was always thinking of all,” Yasser, her son, reminisced.

But Suad is not an exception in the occupied Palestinian territories where massacres, the last of which was left 13 people and more than 50 others injured of a Gaza Strip refugee camp Sunday, January 26, appeared to be a daily practice to which the Israeli army is committed.

She is the sixth on a list of other female martyrs who felt losing their lives can help end the bloodshed in the Palestinian territories. The first was Wafaa Idris, a young 26-year-old university graduate.

More women are lining up for the road to martyrdom, leading researchers to probe the phenomenon and its causes.

“The phenomenon of Palestinian women taking part in attacks against Israeli targets rises with the growing Israeli aggressions against innocent Palestinians in parallel,” a study by the Center of Palestinian Captives revealed.

Moreover, the Israeli forces still keep 42 Palestinian women in detention since April 2002, most of them aged 15 and 25 years.

On Thursday, January 23, came the latest, but not the last case. Israeli forces detained the wife of a jailed leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), as she tried to cross from the occupied West Bank to Jordan.

The detention of 47-year-old Ablah Saadat, wife of Ahmad Saadat, who is held in Jericho under U.S.-U.K. supervision at the request of Israel, as he was planning to fly from Jordan to Brazil to attend the World Social Forum which began Thursday.