The site of Saturday night’s suicide bombing at a wedding ceremony in Turkey. Photo: ABC News/Screenshot.

A Knesset member and terrorism expert tied Saturday night’s suicide bombing in southern Turkey to legislation she sponsored that reduces the age at which a minor can be imprisoned for adult crimes, the Hebrew news site nrg reported on Monday.

According to the report, Likud MK Anat Berko was referring to the purportedly young age (12-14) of the terrorist who blew himself up at a Kurdish wedding celebration in Gaziantep, and the recent amendment to Israel’s Youth Law, which allows for the incarceration of 12-14-year-old killers.

In a post on Facebook, Berko – author of The Path to Paradise: The Inner World of Suicide Bombers and Their Dispatchers and The Smarter Bomb: Women and Children as Suicide Bombers — wrote:

A child terrorist who murders dozens of people — who would believe it? Well, I would believe it, because I know who we are dealing with, and therefore this phenomenon does not surprise me at all. And that is the reason I enacted the amendment to the Youth Law, the purpose of which was to hold underage terrorists accountable.

So when the women of [left-wing political party] Meretz objected to the legislation, from my point of view it was completely logical, since for those who live in La-La Land, if a certain phenomenon does not jibe with their perfectly crystallized perception of the world, it does not exist at all, and thus a law enacted to confront it is unnecessary.

But, when [Joint Arab List] MK Osama Sa’adi, MK Ahmed Tibi’s brother-in-law, who is considered to this day as the number one defense attorney for [Palestinian] political prisoners — objects to my legislation on the grounds that it is unnecessary [because] the phenomenon doesn’t actually exist, he is simply lying through his teeth. He is very familiar with this phenomenon — a phenomenon, which among other things, has contributed to his livelihood…

On the other hand, as cheerful Meretz women continue to bury their heads in the sand, and as MK Sa’adi continues to try and sell his One Thousand and One Nights [tales] to us — the main thing is that both they and he remain in the opposition, and I will continue to enact laws to safeguard Israelis’ security. It seems to be a perfectly fair deal…

According to the new law, which was approved by the Knesset on August 3, minors under the age of 14 can be incarcerated for crimes such as murder, attempted murder and manslaughter. The bill was initiated following a spate of stabbing and other terrorist attacks committed by Palestinian kids during the “lone-wolf intifada” that began last September.

According to a CNN report on Monday, not only was the bomber in Turkey a minor, but 22 of the 54 killed in the blast were under 14 as well.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused terror group ISIS of being behind the attack.