Palestinian fighters face "temporary" Lebanon burial

By Tom Perry

BEIRUT (Reuters) - Some crept into Israel by boat, others used ladders to scale the border fence from Lebanon to attack the Jewish state.

Their bodies returned to Lebanon by truck on Wednesday -- part of an exchange between Israel and the Lebanese guerrilla group Hezbollah. Most of the nearly 200 bodies due to be returned are thought to be Palestinian, killed in decades of conflict with Israel.

Exhumed from numbered graves in a cemetery in northern Israel, the dead include Dalal al-Mughrabi, remembered by Palestinians as a heroine and by Israelis as a terrorist for leading a 1978 raid that killed around 35 people.

Also killed during the attack, Mughrabi became a prominent symbol of the Palestinians' fight for statehood.

Her body was received with military honors by Hezbollah -- a fighting force which didn't even exist when the 20-year-old law student and her team of Palestinian fedayeen (guerrillas) sailed from Lebanon to Israel in small rubber boats.

They landed on a beach in northern Israel, where they shot dead an American woman taking wildlife photos before hijacking a civilian bus on the coastal highway.

Born in Beirut to a Lebanese mother and a Palestinian father, Mughrabi led a secret life as a guerrilla in Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement. Before leaving the family home for the last time, she handed her mother a portrait photo of herself.

"She said 'take this picture'. I felt great sadness and distress. I asked myself 'why has she brought me this,'?" said her mother, 70-year-old Aminah Ismail. "As she got further away she kept looking back and waving goodbye. She crossed the road and she was still waving to me."