BEIRUT: 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 yesterday — part of an exchange between Israel and the Lebanon’s Hezbollah. Most of the nearly 200 bodies 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 in the attack, Al-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 (fighters) sailed from Lebanon to Israel in small rubber boats.
Born in Beirut to a Lebanese mother and a Palestinian father, Al-Mughrabi led a secret life as a fighter 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.”
Al-Mughrabi’s body was accompanied by the remains of three other members of the raiding party whose attack triggered Israel’s 1978 invasion of south Lebanon — territory controlled by Palestinian factions at the time.
Yesreday, Israel turned the bodies over as part of a swap under which it received the bodies of two Israeli soldiers captured by Hezbollah in 2006 in a raid that triggered another Lebanon war.
The deal secured the release of five Lebanese held in Israeli prisons — a major triumph for Hezbollah.
But the return of Palestinian fighters, including Al-Mughrabi, draws mixed emotions.
“She had wanted to be in Palestine — her country,” Ismail said, explaining her daughter’s wish to be buried within the borders of mandate Palestine.
“But this is also her country,” Ismail added.
Sultan Aboul Einein, a Fatah official and veteran fighter, said as many as 150 of the dead were former Fatah fedayeen who would have made the same choice as Al-Mughrabi.
“They represent an historic, essential stage in our struggle,” he said.
“They all fought for Palestine and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.”
They will have a temporary burial here until their burial in Palestine, he added.
