Dressed in military fatigues and brandishing an assault rifle, a young man pledges allegiance to a Palestinian militia. The 29-year-old married father of three looks into the camera, and vows to carry out a suicide attack in Israel — even if it means killing young children.

“God will accept our martyrdom,” declares the Gaza native. Known by his nom de guerre, Abu Huzaifa, he is among more than a dozen Palestinian terrorists featured in filmmaker Pierre Rehov’s documentary “Suicide Killers,” which opens tomorrow in New York.

Two years ago, Mr. Rehov, an Algeria-born Jewish filmmaker who has directed seven documentaries, including the controversial 2003 film “The Road to Jenin,” set out to make a film about Israelis wounded in suicide bombings. But in the early stages of his project, his focus shifted from the victims to the terrorists.

“I would hear the same story over and over,” Mr. Rehov told The New York Sun. “They were waiting in a disco or they were sitting in a pizzeria. They saw a man with a big smile approach, they heard an explosion, and the rest of their life was ruined.”

In an attempt to determine “what was behind the smile,” Mr. Rehov spent two years conducting on-camera interviews with avowed terrorists and their families. There were Palestinian men and women whose suicide missions were intercepted, who survived self-inflicted explosions, or who planned or coordinated other suicide attacks.

“As you know, God has announced that he would place 72 virgins in Paradise, and I would be the prettiest of them all,” a convicted terrorist, serving a life sentence in an Israeli women’s prison, said.

To conduct prison interviews, Mr. Rehov was required to get permission from both the Israeli government and the terror groups with which the interviewees are affiliated, he said. Two years after he embarked on the project, the filmmaker said terrorism is rooted in the Islamic notion of pure and impure. Indeed, the film dwells on his subjects’ notion of heaven as an orgiastic fantasyland, where some behaviors considered impure on Earth are sanctioned.

“This life does not interest me,” one would-be bomber, arrested when he was just 14, said. “I prefer the eternal life. I prefer the life that has been promised to me in Paradise.”

Suicide terror is not rooted in poverty, oppression, or statelessness, Mr. Rehov argues. Rather, he says, the culture of suicide bombing is, at least in part, a manifestation of perversion caused by sexual deprivation in fundamentalist Islam, which demands an absolute separation between the sexes. Buoyed by the assertions of a variety of mental health professionals, whose commentary is featured prominently in “Suicide Killers,” Mr. Rehov contends that terrorists equate suicide explosions with achieving sexual fulfillment. “Because of the level of brainwashing, there’s a confusion between death and love,” he said.

The rise of global terrorism has cultivated Western interest in suicide tactics. “We’re trying to understand this with our occidental values,” Mr. Rehov said. “It’s something irrational that you can’t explain with logic. It’s like trying to explain God with science.”

But what of explaining suicide bombing in art? In recent years, there has been a spate of films about the terror tactics, and the psychopathology of the men and women who employ them.

Last year “Paradise Now,” a fictional account of two recruited suicide bombers was the first-ever Palestinian film to be nominated for an Academy Award, and won a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film.

The film accentuated the divide and, in the case of the characters, the struggle between Islamic fundamentalism and moderate, Western ideals by giving one of the prospective bombers a love interest who had been educated in Europe and who would surely have disapproved of his plan were she privy to it. When the time comes to do his “duty,” the bomber’s conflicted conscience causes him to stop short of explaining why he has come to say goodbye to her.

In addition to “Suicide Killers,” two documentaries on the subject have also come out in the past two years. In 2004, there was “Death in Gaza,” a documentary that explores a society that celebrates “the cult of martyrdom.” (One of the directors, James Miller, was shot to death by an Israeli tank during the filming.) The following year, there was “The Cult of the Suicide Bomber,” about the history of the terror tactic, written and narrated by a former CIA operative, Robert Baer.

Like “Suicide Killers,” both films attempted to understand what creates a suicide bomber. But there is a difference between understanding a society and understanding what it is to be an indoctrinated member of that society. Filmmakers who examine Islamic society from the outside share a noble goal in trying to get inside the minds of these so-called “martyrs.” But if these recent films are any indication, the goal may be unattainable.