Hundreds of Palestinians poured in for condolences and coffee. Members of Shadi Tubasi's family formed a greeting line, handing each new arrival a postcard celebrating the "hero" of the Haifa explosion. And in a corner, 31-year-old Walid Fayad, unsmiling as he clutches an M16 rifle, explained the unusual absence of sugar in the cardamom coffee that is served in tiny china cups: "Today we drink it bitter, so that we can share the Tubasi family's bitterness for the Israelis." Fayad waved away the revulsion and horror of the previous afternoon, when a bomb detonated by 18-year-old Tubasi tore apart the lives and bodies of 15 people lunching in a road-side restaurant at the port city of Haifa.

We were in a fetid refugee camp in Jenin, and instead the gunman spoke with disturbing relish of the terrible fighting that was about to engulf the camp: "It'll be a massacre," he said. "But we are ready to be martyrs. All of us await our fate . . . we want to go out with bomber's belts strapped to our bodies, because that is better than sitting at home, waiting for them to kill us. So before they kill me, I have to do something - I must explode myself with some Israelis. We want our turn to die . . . it will be good to be with God." The exploration of the wave of self-destruction in the Middle East started with Shadi Tubasi's April 1 bombing in Haifa. It became a tour of the terror towns of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip; it became a week of clandestine meetings. We came face to face with two bombers who have been trained and were waiting to strike; with the trainers of others and those who dispatch them; with the military and political leadership of Palestinian factional cells that justify the carnage and with the man who they say lit the ideological fuse for this brutal bout of death - the ailing 61-year-old cleric, Sheik Ahmed Yassin. He said: "The Jews attack and kill our civilians - we will kill theirs. When the first drop of the martyr's blood spills on the ground, he goes to paradise. His victims, the Jews, go to hell." So for him the bomb was "an exceptional weapon". Khaled, a hotel worker, spoke in wonderment of a martyr's encounter at the gates of heaven as someone having their file checked: "There will be blessings for 70 of his family and friends. The 72 virgins are real - their skin is so pale and beautiful that you can see the blood in their veins. If one of these virgins spits in the ocean, the seawater becomes sweet. The martyr is so special he does not feel the pain of being in the grave and all that his family has to do to cleanse his file thoroughly, is to repay his outstanding debts." Surely, we ask, this view of the Quran should be seen as philosophical? As a parable? But no, there was a chorus of disagreement from a gathering of his friends in the teeming Jabalya refugee camp near Gaza City: "No. This is real . . . this is as it will be," said Khaled, as much for himself as on behalf of younger Palestinians who now talk endlessly of the benefits of death over life in a bombing campaign that has killed more than 200 Israelis in 18 months.

But Dr Rabah Mohanna, who’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine has claimed its own share of the violence - including last year's assassination of a minister in the Israeli Government - is confounded by youth's lunge for the grave: "Thousands of young men and women are ready to be blown up. It is a new phenomenon - you have no idea how big it is." Until late last year the sacrifice business had been monopolized by two organizations - the militant and hugely popular Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Both oppose the peace process and the very existence of the state of Israel. But this year they have been overshadowed by a new group - the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade, which grew out of the impoverished Balata refugee camp on the outskirts of Nablus, in an attempt by Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction to mobilize younger members who were switching allegiance to the other two groups. Political change at the university explains the urgency behind Arafat's Fatah movement setting up the brigade. Fatah used to dominate the student council and the academic staff, but in last year's elections Hamas and Islamic Jihad swept to power. But frustration with the stalled peace process did not fuse just the students. Community opinion polls in recent months have found Palestinian support for the renewed violence runs as high as 80 per cent. And parents are running out of arguments for their children. As she planned her death in February, 21-year-old Dareen Abu Aisheh argued with her family: "Aren't we being shot down like dogs? Do you feel like a human being when the Israelis control your every move? Do you believe we have a future? If I'm going to die at their hands anyway, why shouldn't I take some of them with me?" Her uncle, Jasser Khalili, says that finally he had to admit he could not argue against his headstrong niece. She had been angered and depressed by the sacrifice-bomb death of a cousin and after being spurned by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade accepted her as a bomber. About the same time in Tulkarm, the parents of 15-year-old Noura Shalhoub were trying to lift her out of her depression when she took a kitchen knife and rushed a soldier at a checkpoint near her town. He shot her and she bled to death where she fell.

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