"Am I therefore become your enemy,because I TELL YOU THE TRUTH...?"
(Galatians 4:16)

Palestinian fighters face "temporary" Lebanon burial

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 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."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.Israel turned over the remains 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 the Shi'ite Islamist group which was set up in 1982 with Iranian help to fight Israeli forces occupying Lebanon.But the return of Palestinian fighters, including 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 guerrilla, said as many as 150 of the dead were former Fatah fedayeen who would have made the same choice as 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.""Upon their arrival they will have a temporary burial until their burial in Palestine."
http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSL1670214620080716?pageNumber=2&virtualBrandChannel=0
As in the days of Noah...