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The Palestinian who blew himself up in the Israeli resort of Eilat on Monday was unemployed, despondent over the death of his baby daughter and driven to avenge his best friend’s killing by Israeli troops, relatives said.Dozens of neighbors celebrated outside 20-year-old Mohammed Siksik’s house after the fiery attack that killed him and three other people, waving his photo and praising him as a martyr. Inside, his mother greeted mourners with a smile.

“He told me: ‘Meeting God is better for me than this whole world,’” said Rowayda Siksik, wearing a white veil.

She said her son told her only that he was going to carry out an operation inside Israel. “He said, ‘Goodbye, I am going, mother. Forgive me.’ I told him, ‘God be with you.’”

Siksik never found steady work, getting by with occasional jobs with his father, installing tiles. “You can’t find work in this place,” his mother said. Her son lost his 7-month-old daughter to a nerve disease, she said.

Sitting on the floor of her bare house, the mother said her son’s best friend, Nader Amrein, was killed six months ago in an Israeli military operation in northern Gaza. Amrein was a member of Fatah, the movement of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

As the brother of a top Islamic Jihad official, Siksik made an easy target for recruitment for the suicide attack.

Originally sympathetic to the more secular Fatah, Siksik’s life changed after the death of his friend. “He became religious about six months ago,” his mother said. “He joined Islamic Jihad.”

Outside the house, Islamic Jihad and Fatah members argued heatedly over who would sponsor Siksik’s funeral. The two groups claimed to have jointly planned the attack.

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