Abdullah Quraan earned as much as $4 a day during the last year ferrying packages on rickety pushcarts through the phalanx of Israeli soldiers who scrutinize every person and parcel coming out of this Palestinian city.

On Monday, a stranger gave the 11-year-old porter an unusually heavy payload with instructions to deliver it to a woman on the other side of the Hawara checkpoint, the southern gateway to Nablus. But minutes later, soldiers on alert for smuggled weapons arrested the boy and blew up the package, leaving behind a small crater of bolt and metal shrapnel.

A day later the incident had become more fuel to the ongoing debate over the involvement of minors in the Palestinian uprising, now in its fourth year.

Accusing terrorists of handing young Abdullah a booby-trapped bomb and then trying to activate the explosive’s mobile-phone detonator, Israeli army officials said the incident highlighted the militants’ cynical exploitation of children.

“I don’t know what the bag looked like inside,” Abdullah told The Jewish Week in an interview in his home here. “When I saw the soldiers surrounding the bag, that’s when I started to be worried.”

Abdullah convinced Israeli interrogators that he was unaware of the contents of the bag. “People were terrified once the explosive experts came,” he said.

Palestinians, like the sixth-grade boy, were left dumbfounded. While some were quick to offer conspiracy theories alleging Israeli secret agents as the perpetrators, many acknowledged continuing examples of kids becoming mixed up in attacks on Israelis.

Nablus residents in particular are familiar with an uprising run amok. The withering of central authority in the choked city has left a vacuum filled by lawless militants with allegiances tied to political faction, neighborhood or clan.

The ensuing internecine violence has left at least 30 dead and forced the resignation of the city’s mayor. So at a garage just down the block from Abdullah Quraan’s Balata refugee camp home, the notion that militants would co-opt an unsuspecting child did not sound far-fetched.

Sa’id Moukhsen said he escorted his 16-year-old son to school and decided to drive his 5-year-old daughter around in his taxi for fear of them being abducted.

“When they give themselves the right to use an 11-year-old, they can kidnap children,” he said. “Everybody is talking about it, and everybody is annoyed.”

In recent months, a Palestinian teenager was stopped en route to a suicide bombing attack and two minors were caught trying to slip into Israel with handmade guns. Youths in the Gaza Strip have been encouraged to test the tolerance of Israeli soldiers guarding the security fence that blocks off entrance to Israel, Palestinians said.

Ahmed Zamel, a Palestinian policeman, suggested that some militants were taking advantage of the city’s chaotic state to execute “their own vision of resistance.”

Local members of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed offshoot of Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat’s Fatah Party, were put on the defensive and denied any connection to the plot.

Brandishing M-16s, two plainclothes militants surfaced at the Quraan household to offer their own explanation as journalists questioned Abdullah.

Intimating that the Israelis blew up a bomb of their own, a militant in his mid-20s pressed the boy about whether he had actually witnessed explosion of the parcel. He didn’t rule out, however, the possibility that “irresponsible people” could have given an explosive to the boy.

“We are not convinced of what the Israelis say,” said one of the militants, who refused to give his name for fear of capture by Israeli soldiers. “They are focusing on this young boy’s story, which has been inflated. Instead they should focus on all of the people they are killing.”

The same sentiment was echoed by Abdullah’s mother and sister. Upon returning home Monday, the boy turned on his regular cartoon show as if nothing had happened, family members said. Faced later by reporters who arrived to inquire about the incident, Abdullah’s face went pale as the memory of the ordeal resurfaced.

The boy, speaking quietly on Tuesday, said he was stopped by a female soldier at the checkpoint who searched his bags. After witnessing the bomb explosion from a distance of 20 yards, he was taken to a district army office where he was questioned at length. The child porter said the soldiers gave him chocolates and biscuits, but also beat him during a three-hour interrogation.

An Israeli army spokeswoman denied the allegations about the interrogation. Maj. Sharon Feingold said the baby-faced porter was familiar to the dozens of heavily armed soldiers at the checkpoint. Members of Fatah’s Tanzim also took note of that fact, she alleged.

“He wasn’t a stranger. He was quite stunned to learn that he was carrying a bomb of a suicide explosion,” Feingold said. “They have no boundaries of imagination to use an 11-year-old boy and to use him as a human bomb without his knowledge.”

Palestinian political analyst Bashir Barghouti complained that Palestinians have been quietly grappling with the issue for months, but no one has been paying attention. At a conference in Jenin in September sponsored by the Palestinian Center for Peace and Democracy, a public call was made to militant groups like Islamic Jihad and the Fatah to keep away from children.

“Palestinian society is aware about this issue and it is concerned,” Barghouti said. “Most of the leaders in the field don’t have any experience. Because of the arrests we are talking about third- or fourth-generation leaders, and they are irresponsible.”

Back at the Hawara checkpoint on Tuesday, 14-year-old porter Khaled Ziyad — an associate of Abdullah Quraan — was back at work earning money to help his family. Returning to the Palestinian side of the blockade with an empty wheelbarrow, the boy said he would approach his customers with more suspicion.

“Now I open everything that is given to me. I am afraid that I will be put in jail and my house will be demolished,” Khaled said. “Suddenly, pushing a cart has become dangerous.”