Cyber-what?

Among many an interesting information item in the new Wired article by Bruce Sterling “The Growth Market in Walls,” dealing with some globalizing aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (forwarded by Deckard by way of #seir, again), this particularly attracted my attention:

Soon, thanks to the Wall, Sides I and P really will be two different sides, physically and permanently. They won't even be able to see each other; suddenly, the enemy will become little more than a blank concrete slab. Humanizing interaction will become impossible, except for email - but even that medium has found the two sides at odds: In 2001, Mona Awana, a bright and pretty young Side P activist and journalist, used her cyberchat skills to lure a 16-year-old Side I boy named Ofir Nahum into a deadly Kalashnikov ambush.

This sounds like a pretty significant story, and the only excuse I got for missing it at the time, was that I was too busy absorbing domestic news of war in 2001.

When you don’t get results, you get excuses and fries with that. Anyway, here’s a Reuters photo of Mona and Ofir, from some Hungarian site:

NewsFactor cited several possible motives in their article about the case: nationalism, robbery, and:

Still another possibility, according to one Palestinian source, was that Rahum's murder might have been an "honor killing" because relations between Palestinian women and Israeli men are prohibited and seen as a blight on the family name. It's possible, the source continued, that Awana might have offered up Rahum in exchange for her own life.

In addition, this really unmade my day:

Whatever the motive, Rahum's bereaved parents told an Israeli newspaper that children "should not use the Internet because the Internet kills. The killers attracted" their son through the Internet "and took him to where they wanted to kill him."

Most recent piece I found about Mona is Jerusalem Post article from some January 23 (year unknown) informing that she “petitioned the High Court of Justice yesterday, demanding the right to meet with a lawyer.”