Hijack queen comes home to Palestine

Israel is letting Leila Khaled, the queen of the 1970 generation of Palestinian airline hijackers, return to Palestinian territory for the first time since she fled her native Haifa for Lebanon as a four-year-old refugee in 1948.

She is due in Gaza next month for a special session of the Palestine National Council, the old parliament in exile, to debate proposed amendments to the 1964 Palestinian Covenant, which called for the destruction of the Jewish state. Israel, which still controls the Jordanian and Egyptian borders, has announced that once the council members are back, they will be allowed to stay.

Ms Khaled, whose gun-toting portrait once competed as a revolutionary icon with that of Che Guevara, first made headlines in August 1969 when she hijacked a TWA flight from Los Angeles to Tel Aviv during a stopover in Rome. The Boeing 707 was flown to Damascus, where the cockpit was blown up. Two Israeli passengers were held for 44 days before being released in exchange for two Syrian prisoners of war.

Her next operation, during a spectacular season of international hijackings by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in "Black" September, 1970, was thwarted. An Israeli security man opened fire on Ms Khaled and an American radical, Patrick Arguello, when they tried to hijack an El Al flight from Amsterdam to New York. Arguello was killed. The pilot made an emergency landing at London's Heathrow airport, where Ms Khaled was detained.

Despite Israeli protests, she was freed three weeks later when Britain, Switzerland and West Germany exchanged seven captured Palestinian fighters for 310 civilian hostages from four airliners hijacked to Jordan.

Ms Khaled, now 52 and married with one son, always claimed to be fighting for two revolutions: the liberation of Palestine from Zionism, and the liberation of her sex from "man and the ideas that he practises on woman".

Although Israel detected her hand behind three subsequent attacks on Israelis, she soon switched her attention to the political, rather than the armed struggle. Her face was too well known for any more hijackings. Dressed in jeans, designer shirts and dark glasses, she became a familiar figure on the Third World feminist circuit.

Ada Cohen, an Israeli delegate to the 1975 international women's conference in Mexico City, found herself sitting next to Leila Khaled on a bus. She said yesterday that when the Palestinian sister asked which delegation she was from, she got off at the next stop.

Ms Khaled, who now lives in Amman, is reported to have moved closer to the mainstream nationalism of Yasser Arafat. She is one of 103 PNC members Israel has so far agreed to let back. Another 90 applications are still being considered.

The Popular Front leader, George Habash, is not now expected to join them. He prefers to wait until he can return to his native Lydda, now part of Israel.