An Israeli military court indicted a 15-year-old Palestinian boy on charges of recruiting teenagers to become suicide bombers, then helping prepare them for missions to kill Israelis.
The court said on Tuesday that Nasser Awartani was the key contact between the youth of the West Bank city of Nablus and two militant groups, that he personally recruited a 16-year-old who blew himself up at a military checkpoint last year and another who was caught with a bomb strapped to his body.
Palestinian militant groups, especially around Nablus, have been trying to attract youth to carry out attacks, feeling they are more likely to evade Israeli security checks. Some Palestinian intellectuals and educators have criticized the practice.
Israel's military court in the northern West Bank charged Awartani with 12 counts, including attempted murder and membership in a militant group. Several of the counts would carry a maximum sentence of life in prison.
The court said Awartani oversaw a recruitment network for the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, ferrying potential bombers to initial meetings with militants and helping them with the final preparations for attacks.
He took the bombers to get their hair cut before attacks, preparing for martyrdom and the afterlife, and he helped them travel from place to place undetected, the indictment said.
Awartani was also accused of involvement in the most highly publicized incident, in which Hussam Abdo, 16, was caught at a checkpoint outside Nablus wearing a suicide bomb vest. Soldiers forced Abdo to remove his shirt and cut off the bomb in an incident captured on TV.
He also recruited Sabih Abu Saud -- at 16 the youngest suicide bomber in three-and-a-half years of violence -- who wounded one Israeli soldier when he blew himself up last November.
Awartani's mother, Ihlas, said her son spent all his free time at home and could not have been guilty of the offenses.
"They want to blame someone, so they have chosen my son," she said.
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