Ofir's Fatal Liaison

Their online conversations resonated with the innocence and beauty of a budding romance. She told him he appeared to her in her dreams. He told her he missed her constantly. Many of their exchanges ended with the words "I love you." But while Ofir Rahum, the 16-year-old Israeli, who only weeks earlier had learned to shave, boasted to friends about his courtship of an older woman, his Palestinian chat pal was hatching a sinister plot. In conversations over several months Amneh Muna pressed for one thing--a meeting in Jerusalem. When he suggested a venue closer to his home, she said she couldn't get a car. When he said his parents would object, she promised to deliver him back by 5. The pledge and a few sexual innuendoes persuaded the boy. "You don't know how much I'm waiting for Wednesday," Muna wrote him two days before their meeting. Rahum would finally see Muna--and then pay for the meeting with his life.

This story, like the six months of fighting between Israelis and Palestinians, is characterized by tribal vengeance, ghastly violence, teenage death. But it has something more. A transcript of the online conversations between Rahum and Muna, obtained exclusively by NEWSWEEK, is testimony to the depth of hatred many Palestinians feel for Israelis after the killing of nearly 400 of their brethren (66 Israelis have also died in the violence). Muna, the 25-year-old seductress, who appeared in court last week for the first time since her arrest, hardly fits the profile of a terrorist. She comes from a middle-class home in the West Bank, has a degree in psychology and worked as a journalist. But after covering funerals for dozens of Palestinians killed in clashes with Israelis and interviewing their anguished families, Muna wanted revenge. "Seeing mothers crying all the time gave her the idea," said Muna's mother, Samira. Her plan was to lure an Israeli to Jerusalem. Her goal was to make an Israeli mother suffer.

Muna grew up in a suburb of Ramallah in the West Bank and was active in Fatah, the PLO faction of Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat. But in cyberspace, she presented herself as Sali and told chat partners she was an Israeli who recently arrived from Morocco. Starting last October she engaged several Israeli men in conversation, usually from a terminal at the Al-Abed Internet caf e in Ramallah. Mona Mekhafeh, who works at the cafe, remembers seeing Muna gazing at a Web site with pictures of a badly tortured Palestinian. "Her face went deathly pale, almost yellow. She looked furious." From the cafe she made contact with Israeli Meir Karni. According to the indictment against Muna, they met several times in Jerusalem. When he refused to go to Ramallah, she resumed her Web search and found Rahum, chatting with him almost daily. She told two friends, Fatah militants Hassan al-Qadi and Fatah a-Dola, that she intended to draw Rahum to the West Bank and would need their help.

In many ways, Rahum was the perfect victim. At 16, he thought more about girls than the fighting that raged in the West Bank and Gaza, though he lived just north of Gaza in the town of Ashkelon. Rahum was an Internet aficionado, had his own Web site and spent hours after school surfing the Net. The chats got so extensive that his father, Shalom Rahum, sometimes worried. "I came home one day and walked into his room. He didn't notice me. He was deep into a chat with a 31-year-old woman who had two kids," Shalom said. He cautioned his son against speaking to a woman unsuitable for him. But for Rahum, finding Sali was a stroke of luck; meeting her became an obsession.

By mid-January the two had worked out the details of their first rendezvous. The day before the meeting, according to one high-school friend, Rahum told classmates: "If I'm not in school tomorrow, be happy for me." On the morning of their meeting, Rahum left home at 7, telling his parents he was going to school. With his hair smartly gelled and his red backpack slung over his shoulder, Rahum boarded a bus to Jerusalem. There, at the central station, he recognized Muna from the description in her message: "I am 169 cm [tall]," she wrote, "black hair [in a] bob, hazel eyes." The two boarded a taxi for an address in northern Jerusalem where Muna had left her car, a late-model Ford Escort, then made their way north, toward Ramallah, where the two Fatah men were waiting.

Rahum, who had been to Jerusalem only once, probably didn't realize that he and Muna had crossed into the West Bank, Palestinian territory. She had told him they would spend the day at the home of a friend, who had offered use of her apartment. Instead she pulled over at the meeting point, where Qadi pointed a Kalachnikov at Rahum's head. The rest of the story, related in Muna's confession, unspools in a series of chilling snapshots: Rahum refusing to leave the car, Qadi tugging at his torso, Rahum clinging to the steering wheel, Qadi stepping back and pumping the boy's body with bullets.