In a chilling real-life story indicative of the evil that the Israeli population faces from Palestinians, former Fox News reporter Leland Vittert, now with NewsNation, recounted a bloodcurdling tale of a Palestinian woman whose life was saved twice by Israel but still wanted to murder Israelis.
Vittert told his story to Bari Weiss of The Free Press. Because of the dramatic nature of the story, the complete transcript is reprinted below:
Vittert:
In 2012, I’m a foreign correspondent for Fox. Normally, when you’re based in Jerusalem you’re covering protests in the West Bank or riots in the West Bank on and on and on. Because of the Arab Spring I really hadn’t spent that much time in Israel, and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was not a thing in those years, there had been a couple of Gaza skirmishes.
But there was the Gilad Shalit deal, where there was an Israeli soldier who had been held hostage and traded from Gaza to Israel for 1,000 Palestinian prisoners —
“Including Sinwar,” Weiss interjected, referencing Yahya Sinwar, who headed the horrific October 7, 2023, massacre of more than 1200 Israelis.
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Vittert continued:
Including Sinwar and including a woman named Wafa. And Wafa had been a woman in Gaza. She had pulled a pot of boiling water over herself when she was like five or six years old. The Israelis treat most of the people out of Gaza who have really horrific burns, catastrophic medical injuries.
She goes back to Gaza after being treated for four or five years in Israel but has a pass to get in and out of Israel, which very few people in Gaza did at the time.
So she gets recruited to be a suicide bomber. This is in the Second Intifada, so in the mid-2000s. And there’s the video of her, coming to the checkpoint to get into Israel wearing her suicide vest, and she’d been given three options by the Al-Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade: a bus, a café, or the hospital that had treated her and saved her life. She chose the hospital that had treated her and saved her life.
She gets to the checkpoint; they discover that she has a bomb, or they think she does; she tries to detonate it; it doesn’t go off. She gets thrown in jail.
Again; the Israelis treat her. They help her with her burns. The educate her. They give her a college degree.
And now, in the Gilad Shalit deal, she goes back to Gaza.
So I go to Gaza to interview her, thinking this is going to be a redemption story. It was before Christmas, right? That she’s gonna say —
“Perfect Christmas story,” Weiss interjected.
Vittert:
— that “I am going to be the one to try and forge peace, and I believe in peace; I’ve seen that the Israelis are not evil that I don’t want to kill them anymore.”
Fine. So I get into Gaza, and I bring with me the iPad that has the video of her trying to blow herself up. So we’re sitting across from each other like this (gesturing to Weiss sitting facing him). She’s wearing a hijab in a very junky Gazan apartment — it is an awful place in every sense of the word – and I show her the video. And I said, “What do you think, watching this?” And she says, “Oh! Oh! Oh!” has all this reaction, and she goes, “I’m thinking I almost tasted paradise.”
Okay. “Would you do it again?” “Absolutely in a minute. This is my calling in life.”
I said, “Wait a second. These people treated you and all of your burns. They saved your life. You tried to blow them up. They still treated you. They educated you. And now you have a chance at life back here in Gaza and you’d want to blow them up?” And she goes, “Absolutely, They are the infidels. They are evil, they are the enemy.” I can’t remember what the exact translation was.
And that’s when my mind was made up of the sort of moral clarity of the Israeli-Palestinian debate. Are the Israelis perfect? No. But that’s what they’re up against.
“They are the infidels. They are evil. They are the enemy.”@LelandVittert on the conversation with a Palestinian suicide bomber that, for him, clarified the moral asymmetry of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“Are the Israelis perfect? No—but that’s what they’re up against.” pic.twitter.com/KsFPUgSAz2
— Honestly with Bari Weiss (@thehonestlypod) September 30, 2025
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