SURIF, West Bank (AP) - A 20-year-old Palestinian woman who was thrown into a well and left to die in the name of "family honor" has not become just another statistic in one of the Middle East's most shameful practices.
The killing of Aya Baradiya - by an uncle who didn't like a potential suitor - sparked such outrage that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas scrapped laws this week that guaranteed sentences of six months or less for such killings.
And in another sign of changing attitudes, the young college student is being mourned as a "martyr" and her grieving parents are being embraced, not shunned, by neighbors.
So-called "honor killings" are committed regularly in traditional Arab societies that enforce strict separation between the sexes and view an unmarried woman's unsupervised contact with a man, even by telephone, as a stain on the family's reputation. There were nine such killings in the West Bank last year, and Jordan reports about 20 every year.
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why is it that Borat comes to mind? They were supposed to... "
THROW THE JEW DOWN THE WELL"
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Abu Mazen»
Honor Killings
