Saving Abigails

Middle East | Remembering an eighth-grader killed two years ago, and hoping the peace process keeps others like her alive | Jamie Dean

What does it mean that Israel’s Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas, the new Palestinian leader, are embarked on what seems to be a real peace process? If it works, we’ll never know the depth of its importance because we won’t know who lives because of it and who would otherwise have died, as Abigail Litle died two years ago this month.

In a Messianic Jewish cemetery in Haifa, Israel, a white tombstone bearing both Hebrew and English script reads, “Abigail Elizabeth Litle.” The 14-year-old daughter of American missionaries Phil and Heidi Litle, Abigail died two years ago—March 5, 2003—in the Palestinian suicide bombing of Bus No. 37 on one of Haifa’s busiest streets.

Eighth-grader Abigail had boarded the bus with a friend after school. Mahmoud Hamdan Kawasme, 20, had boarded the same bus. Kawasme carried a note praising the 9/11 attacks and 130 pounds of explosives laden with metal shrapnel. As Bus No. 37 pulled out of a stop, he detonated the bomb, killing himself and 17 others.