Israel has handed over the remains of scores of Palestinian fighters killed in attacks on Israel.
Eighty bodies were handed over to Palestinian officials in Ramallah on Thursday and another 11 were transferred to the Gaza Strip.

The Palestinian Authority described them as "martyrs" killed since Israel's occupation of the West Bank in 1967.

The fighters had been buried, some of them for decades, in a desolate Israeli military cemetery for "enemy combatants" in the West Bank.

The Palestinian Authority will hold a ceremony for the fighters in the West Bank city of Ramallah. Hamas will hold its own memorial ceremony in the Gaza Strip.

The handover is part of a deal agreed in response to hunger strikes by Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.
Among the bodies are eight members of a seaborne squad which took over a Tel Aviv hotel in 1975 before being killed by Israeli commandos in a raid in which seven hostages were also killed.

The return of the bodies was announced on May 14 by the office of Binyamin Netanyahu, Israeli prime minister, in what it called "a gesture to President [Mahmoud] Abbas".

Abbas has demanded a halt to Israeli settlement building in the West Bank and East Jerusalem as a condition for returning to peace talks that collapsed over the settlement issue in 2010.

The official Palestinian WAFA news agency said the remains will be transferred to families but 17 will be buried in a mass grave in Ramallah because their families could not be identified.

In July Ehud Barak, Israel's defense minister, blocked the transfer of the remains of 84 Palestinians buried in numbered graves in the Jordan Valley "cemetery of enemy combatants", citing the need to review their identities.

PHOTO CAPTION

Trucks carrying the remains reached Ramallah on Thursday morning, 31 May 2012.

Al-Jazeera