PARIS -- Francoise Kesteman, the first French national to die fighting for the Palestinians, turned from nurse to guerrilla after Israel's invasion of Lebanon, her former husband said Tuesday.
'I am fully committed to the Palestinian revolution, I am happy, my life is in danger,' the 34-year-old Kesteman said in her last message to former husband Jean-Louis Jouanaud, a July letter mailed in Damascus.
'We were both pro-Palestinian, but Francoise pushed her commitment to its logical end,' he said in a telephone interview from southern Marseille.
Kesteman, a trained nurse who abandoned her two sons aged 14 and 11 to become a guerrilla, died in a hail of Israeli gunfire Sunday when her five-member Palestinian commando was spotted by Israeli gunboats in waters off occupied south Lebanon and forced to beach.
Jouanaud refused to say when and where Kesteman trained as a Palestinian guerrilla, but said her decision to join the PLO fight for a homeland dated back to 1981, when she worked two months as a volunteer nurse for the Palestinian Red Cross in Lebanon.
A year later she returned to the Palestinian refugee camps of south Lebanon, then assailed by the Israeli march on Beirut.
In a letter published at the time by the French weekly Afrique-Asie, Kesteman recounted the death of a young Palestinian mother named Mouna. 'When Mouna left the bomb shelter to fetch food for the children, Israeli bombers ripped apart her small slender body.'
Jouanaud said 'the Zionist invasion was a turning-point in her life'. The two married in 1969, when Kesteman belonged to the French Communist Party, and separated seven years later. Jouanaud is an elementary school teacher and cares for the couple's children.
Kesteman's older sister, Mireille, said her sister had reappeared briefly in France last year and again this year. 'She said she was going to Algeria and then I heard she was back in Lebanon,' she said.
Mireille described her sister as 'very dogmatic and passionate' concerning any cause she followed, including the Communist party.
Jouanaud said Kesteman had 'described herself as a Palestinian' when he met her in Nice this year. 'But she was extremely discreet as to the exact nature of her work.'
'She knew what she was doing. She died for a cause,' he said.
Yasser Arafat's mainstream Fatah Palestinian group said the commando was en route Sunday for an operation in the area to counter 'the daily massacres of the enemy Zionist troops' when Israeli gunboats spotted their rubber dinghy off the coast and forced it to land.
It was the first attempted attack of its kind since the Israelis pushed into Lebanon in the summer of 1982. The clash left two other guerrillas dead and two captive.
