CAIRO, April 1: Two top Arab religious leader have justified Palestinian suicide bombings against Israelis.

In remarks published on Monday Egypt’s mufti said suicide attacks on Jewish settlements were acts of martyrdom and called for action to end Israel’s “brutal attack” on Palestinians.

“The suicide attacks carried out by fighters in the Israeli settlements are acts of martyrdom. They are one of the highest forms of martyrdom,” Mufti Ahmed al-Tayyeb was reported as saying by the semi-official daily Al Ahram.

“Every (government) official should do his utmost to stop this brutal attack, resist this ferocious enemy and push it far from the Palestinian cities,” Tayyeb was quoted as saying.

Egypt’s other senior theologian, Mohamed Sayyed Tantawi, the grand sheikh of Cairo’s Al Azhar mosque and university, last month also sanctioned suicide attacks on Jewish settlements, but said they should not deliberately attack “the weak”.

Israel’s attacks on Palestinians, as it attempts to halt a wave of Palestinian suicide bombings, has fired up emotions in Egypt and other Arab countries.

In Lebanon, the country’s most respected Shia leader gave his blessing to female suicide bombers like one who struck, calling them authors of a “new, glorious history for Arab and Muslim women”.

In a transcript of an interview with Al-Jazeera television faxed by his office on Monday, Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah said a holy war of the sort he feels Palestinians are waging against Israel could require women to undertake suicide attacks.

“It is true that Islam has not asked women to carry out jihad, but it permits them to take part if the necessities of defensive war dictate that women should carry out any regular military operations, or suicide operations,” he said.

“We believe that the women who carry out suicide bombings are martyrs who are creating a new, glorious history for Arab and Muslim women.”

Last Friday an 18-year-old Palestinian woman blew up herself and two other people in a supermarket in occupied Al Quds, the second Palestinian woman to become a suicide bomber in the 18-month-old uprising against Israeli occupation.

Fadlallah, once the spiritual guide to the Hezbollah, has assumed a largely symbolic role after falling out with the Iranian patrons of the group, which pioneered the use of suicide bombings during Lebanon’s civil war.

Himself the survivor of a car bomb assassination attempt during the war, Fadlallah has always denied ties to suicide bombers, including those who killed over 200 US Marines at their Beirut barracks in 1983, but defends the tactic in principle.—Reuters