12 nov 2004
The flag-covered coffin of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat is carried over the heads of the crowd, after its arrival at his compound for its burial, in Ramallah
Yasser Arafat was buried in the West Bank amid chaotic scenes today, as thousands of mourners gathered to pay tribute to the man known as the father of the Palestinians.The helicopter bearing Arafat's coffin was forced to delay landing in his Ramallah compound after huge crowds burst through the gates and climbed over the walls to pay their final respects to the man who embodied their dreams of statehood.
As the aircraft touched down, gunshots rang out and people chanted "With our blood and soul we redeem you, Abu Ammar," using Arafat's nom-de-guerre.
It took about 30 minutes for Palestinian security forces to clear enough space in the crowd for the helicopter's steps to be lowered.
The casket, draped in a Palestinian flag, was then transferred to a waiting hearse and driven through the mass of mourners to a newly constructed marble tomb outside the compound.
Soil brought from the site of Jerusalem's al-Aqsa mosque - Islam's third holiest site - was poured over the casket as it was lowered into the ground.
Senior Palestinian clerics have said Arafat is being laid to rest in a concrete coffin so that his body can be relocated at a later date to nearby Jerusalem, where he wished to be buried. Israel has vetoed a burial there, however, fearing this would strengthen Palestinians' claim to a capital in the city.
The dramatic scenes in Ramallah were in stark contrast to the funeral service that took place a few hours earlier in a military mosque in Cairo, attended by presidents and ministers from more than 50 countries.
"He has served his people all his life, until he faced his God, with courage and honesty. Let us pray for his soul," the Grand Sheik of Al-Azhar Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, leading the service, told the gathered dignitaries.
The service was broadcast live on Egyptian television, with all foreign journalists barred from the mosque. It was attended by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and state leaders from Arab and African nations, including Thabo Mbeki of South Africa.
Most European countries sent lower level delegations - the British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, attended on behalf of the UK government. The US sent the assistant secretary of state William Burns, in what was seen as a slight attesting to its boycott of Arafat as an "obstacle to peace".
As expected, Israel dispatched no one. "I do not think we should send a representative to the funeral of somebody who killed thousands of our people," Yosef Lapid, the justice minister, said.
After the brief ceremony, which was closed to the public and held amid tight security in a Cairo suburb, the coffin was transferred to a horse-drawn carriage for a military procession through the city bearing all the hallmarks of a state occasion.
The surrounding streets, many of them sealed off, were lined with hundreds of police. Soldiers on rooftops surveyed the area with binoculars.
Doctors at the Percy military hospital in Paris, where Mr Arafat died in the early hours of yesterday, aged 75, after several days in a coma, have refused to reveal the cause of his death, citing family confidentiality.
Yasser Arafat was buried in the West Bank amid chaotic scenes today, as thousands of mourners gathered to pay tribute to the man known as the father of the Palestinians.The helicopter bearing Arafat's coffin was forced to delay landing in his Ramallah compound after huge crowds burst through the gates and climbed over the walls to pay their final respects to the man who embodied their dreams of statehood.
As the aircraft touched down, gunshots rang out and people chanted "With our blood and soul we redeem you, Abu Ammar," using Arafat's nom-de-guerre.
It took about 30 minutes for Palestinian security forces to clear enough space in the crowd for the helicopter's steps to be lowered.
The casket, draped in a Palestinian flag, was then transferred to a waiting hearse and driven through the mass of mourners to a newly constructed marble tomb outside the compound.
Soil brought from the site of Jerusalem's al-Aqsa mosque - Islam's third holiest site - was poured over the casket as it was lowered into the ground.
Senior Palestinian clerics have said Arafat is being laid to rest in a concrete coffin so that his body can be relocated at a later date to nearby Jerusalem, where he wished to be buried. Israel has vetoed a burial there, however, fearing this would strengthen Palestinians' claim to a capital in the city.
The dramatic scenes in Ramallah were in stark contrast to the funeral service that took place a few hours earlier in a military mosque in Cairo, attended by presidents and ministers from more than 50 countries.
"He has served his people all his life, until he faced his God, with courage and honesty. Let us pray for his soul," the Grand Sheik of Al-Azhar Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, leading the service, told the gathered dignitaries.
The service was broadcast live on Egyptian television, with all foreign journalists barred from the mosque. It was attended by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and state leaders from Arab and African nations, including Thabo Mbeki of South Africa.
Most European countries sent lower level delegations - the British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, attended on behalf of the UK government. The US sent the assistant secretary of state William Burns, in what was seen as a slight attesting to its boycott of Arafat as an "obstacle to peace".
As expected, Israel dispatched no one. "I do not think we should send a representative to the funeral of somebody who killed thousands of our people," Yosef Lapid, the justice minister, said.
After the brief ceremony, which was closed to the public and held amid tight security in a Cairo suburb, the coffin was transferred to a horse-drawn carriage for a military procession through the city bearing all the hallmarks of a state occasion.
The surrounding streets, many of them sealed off, were lined with hundreds of police. Soldiers on rooftops surveyed the area with binoculars.
Doctors at the Percy military hospital in Paris, where Mr Arafat died in the early hours of yesterday, aged 75, after several days in a coma, have refused to reveal the cause of his death, citing family confidentiality.
11 nov 2004
Tony Blair will fly to Washington today determined to enlist George Bush in efforts to "reinvigorate" the Middle East peace process after the death of Yasser Arafat.The prime minister paid tribute to the Palestinian leader when he appeared on GMTV this morning, describing him as a "huge icon for the Palestinian people".
"I think the most important thing is to make sure we reinvigorate the peace process because there is misery for Palestinians; there is misery for Israelis who suffer terrorist activity," he said.
Downing Street last night played down expectations of a significant initiative on the peace process coming out of his summit with the US president.
But the death of Mr Arafat presents Mr Blair with an opportunity to persuade Mr Bush, who followed Israel's lead in breaking off contact with the Palestinian leader, to re-engage with the Palestinian Authority.
The prime minister will be hoping that his visit is more successful than his last one to Washington, when he was bounced into backing the plan by Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, to withdraw unilaterally from the Gaza Strip.
As well as pushing the US president to give momentum to the peace process, Mr Blair will try to persuade him to provide practical aid to the authority in Gaza in preparation for the Israeli pull-out.
He will have dinner with the president this evening and attend further talks tomorrow before appearing at a joint press conference in the White House.
While Mr Blair is in Washington the foreign secretary, Jack Straw will attend Mr Arafat's funeral tomorrow in the Egyptian capital, Cairo, and meet Arab and Palestinian leaders.
"I think the most important thing is to make sure we reinvigorate the peace process because there is misery for Palestinians; there is misery for Israelis who suffer terrorist activity," he said.
Downing Street last night played down expectations of a significant initiative on the peace process coming out of his summit with the US president.
But the death of Mr Arafat presents Mr Blair with an opportunity to persuade Mr Bush, who followed Israel's lead in breaking off contact with the Palestinian leader, to re-engage with the Palestinian Authority.
The prime minister will be hoping that his visit is more successful than his last one to Washington, when he was bounced into backing the plan by Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, to withdraw unilaterally from the Gaza Strip.
As well as pushing the US president to give momentum to the peace process, Mr Blair will try to persuade him to provide practical aid to the authority in Gaza in preparation for the Israeli pull-out.
He will have dinner with the president this evening and attend further talks tomorrow before appearing at a joint press conference in the White House.
While Mr Blair is in Washington the foreign secretary, Jack Straw will attend Mr Arafat's funeral tomorrow in the Egyptian capital, Cairo, and meet Arab and Palestinian leaders.
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From an early age, Muhammad Abdul Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini, the sixth child of a Palestinian spice, incense and grocery merchant, sensed that a high destiny awaited him. It did - but Yasser Arafat, who has died aged 75, assuredly earned it by his own endeavours too.
By the standard of lifelong, indefatigable, and for him courageous dedication to a cause, he deserved the title of Mr Palestine that he held for a whole generation of his people's struggle. But by the standards of ultimate achievement, he didn't; rarely can a "liberator" have strayed further from the original ideals of "liberation". |
Arafat was born in Cairo, where his father had settled for business reasons, but after the death of his mother, the four-year-old was packed off to Jerusalem to live with his uncle in a house by the Wailing Wall and al-Aqsa mosque.
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The Zionists' passionate struggle to have exclusive control of the traditionally Muslim-administered Wall made these holy places an emotionally charged arena for the wider struggle for Palestine unfolding under British mandatory rule. Arafat
witnessed anguished family debates about the country's future, and saw something of the "great rebellion", the armed uprising of a desperate and dispossessed peasantry which served as an inspiration for the later, equally unavailing "armed struggle" of his own making. In 1937, on his father's second marriage, he returned to Cairo, where middle class comforts were more than offset by the emotional troubles which an unloved stepmother spread about her. When his father married yet again, his elder sister Inam was assigned the task of bringing up her siblings. The dominating role of women in Arafat's early life probably contributed to a compulsive desire to dominate and lead himself. Inam soon concluded that he was "not like other children in playing or in his feelings... He gathered the Arab kids of the district, formed them into groups and made them march and drill. He carried a stick and he used to beat those who did not obey his commands." Outside Palestine during "the catastrophe" - the 1948 imposing of Israel upon some 78% of the country - he didn't directly suffer the terrors and humiliation of mass flight and exile. But long before that he was steeping himself in political and military affairs. By 1946, the 17-year-old Cairo schoolboy realised that, with the Zionists pressing their armed violence, the Palestinians would have to fight. He became a key, intrepid figure in smuggling arms from Egypt into Palestine. |
But his adolescent exploits were wasted. As Arab armies entered Palestine, "an Egyptian officer came to my group and demanded that we hand over our weapons ... we protested ... but it was no good ... in that moment I knew we had been betrayed by these regimes."
He plunged into preparation for the coming struggle - convinced that if Palestinians relied on others to decide for them, they would never recover their homeland. They had no decision-making institutions, so he set about creating them. He took over the stagnant Cairo-based League Of Palestinian Students.
Tireless, wily, domineering, he exhibited another vital trait which helped shape his career, and, through it, the history of the Middle East. At a congress in Prague, he suddenly donned the keffiyeh, or traditional chequered head-dress, which, as well as hiding his entirely bald pate, became his emblem. The gesture sprang from his delight in surprise, showmanship and the theatrical gesture. Style is often the man, and there was surely an intrinsic affinity between this and a remarkable ability to adapt himself and his movement, suddenly, spectacularly, to new goals and policies in a changing strategic and political environment.
In Prague, the 26-year-old student was already advertising his sense of destiny, referring to himself, only half-jokingly perhaps, as "Mr Palestine". And yet, like many contemporaries, he might well have eschewed politics altogether, and become a self-made man of a more conventional kind. Armed with a Cairo university engineering degree, he went to Kuwait in 1958, one of those stateless Palestinians searching for work in the remote, uncomfortable, undeveloped, but newly oil-rich British-protected emirate. He began as a public works department junior site engineer. Then he set up his own company, subsequently claiming that he had been "well on the way to becoming a millionaire".
An exaggeration, perhaps, but his brief business foray later consolidated a carefully cultivated, if genuine, aspect of his personality. As the leader of his people, he disposed of billions and made canny use of them as an instrument of policy and patronage, but led the most spartan of private lives. Similarly, for all his reputed liaisons with women, he could claim that, at great cost in contentment, his only marriage was to his Revolution.
Helped by the funds which his dalliance with material things procured him, he took the first, clandestine steps that led to his emergence as one of the household names of the age: the incarnation, however flawed, of all their aspirations to most Palestinians; of evil and the would-be destruction of their state to most Israelis; of their most sacred, exasperating, and unavoidable obligations to most Arab regimes; of a gradual conversion from "terrorist" to politician, even statesman, in the eyes of an outside world.
In Kuwait, in 1959, with his close friend Abu Jihad, he began publishing a crudely edited magazine, Our Palestine, which, with impetuous and uncouth vigour, lamented the Palestinian refugees' plight and the inaction of Arab regimes, and trumpeted the ideal of the Return, with a full-scale "population liberation war" as the only means of achieving it. Together they formed the Fatah guerrilla organisation's first, five-man underground cell. On January 1 1965, ill-trained, pitifully short of both weapons and funds, the Feyadeen (those who sacrifice themselves), mounted their first trans-frontier raid into the "Zionist gangster-state".
Arafat's guerrillas were always a much greater challenge to the Arab regimes than they were to the Israelis. In theory, the regimes too were preparing to liberate Palestine - but by conventional military means in their own good time. The first "martyr" fell victim, characteristically, to the Jordanian army. Upon his return from a raid, Arafat himself had a spell in a Syrian jail, amid rumours that the new Syrian defence minister, one Hafiz al-Assad, wanted to hang him and all his comrades.
These early Arafat exploits, though mere pinpricks, gave Israel another reason to fight a war that would end with the country gaining the remaining 22% of Palestine - East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza - which had eluded it in its "war of independence". Even after the shattering Arab defeat in the 1967 war, his guerrillas never put down roots in the newly occupied territories, let alone original Israel proper. Arafat is said to have made his getaway across the Jordan river disguised as a mother carrying a baby, a story that reinforced his growing reputation for the narrow escape and an uncanny sense of survival.
After the battle of Karameh, a small Jordanian town in which, on March 21 1968, an ill-armed band of guerrillas inflicted heavy casualties on a vastly superior force of Israeli invaders, the Fedayeen became the Arab world's darlings. Volunteers flocked to join it and Fatah became a state within the Jordanian state, with Arafat as its "spokesman". Soon he became chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), that assembly of generally docile notables which Egypt's President Nasser had established in 1964 as a way of keeping in check just such ardent young men as himself.
Too many fledgling "freedom-fighters" took to swaggering around the Jordanian capital Amman, advertising their ambition to replace the Hashemite kingdom with their own revolutionary order - and Arafat fell victim to his sudden, meteoric success. His movement suffered from organic defects typical of too-rapid growth - together with those of his individualistic, haphazard leadership style. In "Black September", 1970, King Hussein unleashed his Bedouin soldiers against him - an Arab army dealing Arafat the first of his great reverses.
In a new Lebanese exile, exploiting that country's divisions, he built himself a stronger power base. Yet he was now further from his natural Palestinian environment and his goal of "complete liberation" through "armed struggle". After the 1973 Arab-Israeli war and the partial Arab military comeback that engendered a serious bout of American peace-making, he began edging away from "revolution till victory" towards a "doctrine of stages". He sought what immediate gains he could from a political settlement without renouncing the historical right to all of Palestine. It was the beginning of a moderation that was to take further him than he could have imagined.
For a while his diplomatic successes overshadowed his military ones. In 1974, King Hussein, his historic Arab rival, recognised the PLO as "the sole legitimate spokesman of the Palestinian people". Two weeks later, he addressed the United Nations general assembly at its first full-dress debate on the "Palestine question" since 1952, becoming the first leader of a "national liberation movement" to be so honoured.
That triumph was followed by a dreary period of diplomatic stagnation - and more military-strategic reverses, inflicted first by Arabs, then Israelis, then Arabs again. He took sides in the Lebanese civil war. When his proteges, the Muslim-leftists, were getting the upper hand, Syria's President Assad switched sides, sending in his army to help the right-wing Christian Phalangists. The civil war's first phase ended in 1976 with the atrocious siege and fall of the Palestinian refugee camp of Tal al-Zaatar. At an emergency summit, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait rescued Arafat from Syrian onslaughts.
In 1982 it was the Israelis who invaded Lebanon. In the three-month siege of Beirut, they hunted the PLO leader in person, using F15s as flying assassination squads while their quarry slept on the beach and in parks to evade them. Two hundred people died when, with a laser-guided vacuum bomb, they flattened an apartment block he had left moments before.
With the loss of his last Lebanese politico-military power base, Tunis became his headquarters. Though the Phalangist pogrom of defenceless refugees in the camps of Sabra and Shatila followed his exile, these were not his personally bleakest moments. They came 15 months later after he had slipped back into the Syrian-controlled part of Lebanon, where Assad had helped foment a rebellion against him in the ranks of what was left of the Fatah guerrillas.
Arafat's bold stroke failed: bombarded by Israel from the sea, besieged by Syria, he sailed from Tripoli under a European-arranged safe passage. "Such," prematurely declared the New York Times, "is the bizarre ending of a movement that, for all its daring, never found a political vision."
Three years of seemingly growing irrelevance did indeed lie ahead. And in 1985 Israeli F15s killed 73 people at his seafront Tunis headquarters. His nose for danger had supposedly saved him yet again: he had been out "jogging" at the time. But his political fortunes were sinking to their lowest ebb - at Arab hands. At a 1987 summit, to his fury, Arab leaders for the first time put something other than Palestine - the Iraq-Iran war - at the top of their agenda.
But within weeks the great survivor was savouring a sweet recovery. With the spontaneous, non-armed intifada as his new asset, he found himself in a stronger position than the long, costly "armed struggle" ever conferred on him; the stones that youngsters hurled at Israeli soldiers were more potent than Kalashnikovs. In 1988, he solemnly proclaimed his adherence to the "two-state" solution, involving the Palestinians' renunciation of 78% of their original homeland. He recognised Israel's right to exist. There began a long dreamt of US-PLO dialogue; he called it the Palestinians' "passport to the world".
His historic offer was a delusion, a failed gamble, such was the continuing weakness of Palestinians - and Arabs. For Israel, he was the unregenerate terrorist; and Washington would not gainsay its protege.
To enhance his bargaining power he looked more to a militarily powerful, increasingly militant Iraq. And when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, he backed him, a fatuous miscalculation. In American eyes he forfeited much of the moral and diplomatic respectability he had slowly garnered. If he had taken the other side, he would have been better placed to secure Palestine's place in the "new world order" the US sought to bring into being.
Still, it was a measure of his personal ascendancy that he persuaded the Palestinians to go to the 1991 Madrid peace conference, the first time Israel and its Arab neighbours had talked to each other across a table. But they did so at the price of historic concessions. The Israelis chose which Palestinians they talked to: there was no place for PLO members, let alone Arafat, in the Palestinian delegation. They also largely set the agenda; the Americans backed their refusal to discuss anything suggesting the Palestinians might benefit from such a fundamental 20th-century right as "self-determination".
Madrid got nowhere. It became tempting to speculate that he was tiring of his devotion to the revolution, when, at 62, and to the often disapproving surprise of his people, he took a 28-year-old Palestinian Christian wife, Suha Tawil. Tempting, but wrong. He kept up his endlessly airborne routine. In 1992, his aircraft crash-landed during a Libyan sandstorm. The crew sacrificed themselves to save him - testimony to the loyalty he inspired.
One Jerusalem newspaper called his escape a "heavenly referendum"; for many Palestinians, the relief and joy was genuine enough. Yet before long it was the Israelis who, though they could never love him, re-cast him as an enemy who gave them much more than they had dared to hope.
He began the secret talks that astonished the world as the Oslo agreement. Some of his officials whispered that the crash, the shock it caused to faculties already going awry, had pushed him into this last extremity of "moderation". Weaknesses in Arafat the man now impinged, as never before, on the cause he embodied. Individualism, vanity, deviousness, authoritarianism, a mystical belief in his infallibility had long been apparent. But now it became clear just how primary a concern to Mr Palestine was the destiny of - Mr Palestine. What he wanted, and was ready to pay almost any price to secure, was to come back into the game from which the terms of the Madrid conference, the rise of the "insider" leadership, and the appeal of Hamas fundamentalists, threatened to exclude him.
In one stroke, he did come back. On September 13 1993 he won his accolade as a world statesman. In the signing ceremony on the White House lawn, the 64-year-old former "terrorist" chieftain shook hands with Yitzhak Rabin, prime minister of the Jewish state which he had once made it his mission to remove from the earth.
The price was immense. He claimed that, with Oslo, he had set in train a momentum inexorably leading to Israel's withdrawal from all the occupied territories; the Palestinians were on the road to statehood; he saw the beckoning spires and minarets of its capital, East Jerusalem.
Nine months later he did at least achieve a strictly physical proximity to them. He returned "home". But the self-governing areas he returned to were the merest fragments, in Jericho and Gaza, not merely of original 1948 Palestine, but of the post-1967 22% of it on which he was to build his state. And he came as collaborator as much as liberator.
Oslo provided for a series of "interim" agreements leading to "final-status" talks. An Israeli commentator said of the first of them: "when one looks through all the lofty phraseology, all the deliberate disinformation, the hundreds of pettifogging sections, sub-sections, appendices and protocols, one clearly recognises that the Israeli victory was absolute and Palestine defeat abject."
It went on like this for six years, long after it had become obvious that his "momentum" was working against, not for him. It had been bound to do so, because, in this dispensation that outlawed violence, spurned UN jurisprudence on the conflict, and consecrated a congenitally pro-Israeli US as sole arbiter of the peace process, the balance of power was more overwhelmingly in Israel's favour than ever. The "interim" agreements which should have advanced his conception of "final status" only advanced the Israelis' conception.
Meanwhile he was grievously wanting in that other great, complementary task - the building of his state in the making. His vaunted Palestinian "democracy" was no different from the Arab regimes he had so excoriated for the abuse of his own people and their own. More people were then dying, under torture and maltreatment, in Palestinian jails than in Israeli ones. His unofficial economic "advisers" threw up a ramshackle, nepotistic edifice of monopoly, racketeering and naked extortion which enriched them as it further impoverished society at large, and - being so inefficient - reduced the economic base for all. In 1999, unprecedentedly, 20 leading citizens denounced not just high officials and their business cronies, but the "president", who had "opened the doors to the opportunists to spread their rottenness through the Palestinian street".
With his fortunes again at such a dangerous low ebb, he was approaching another critical point: persist in policies and methods which were slowly undoing him, or revert, to some form of a strategy of militancy and confrontation - and rely anew on the support of his people, rather than the favour of the US, to carry it off. But it was less he, than Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, who imposed this choice.
Barak conceived the fantastically overweening notion of telescoping everything - the "interim" stages which had fallen hopelessly behind schedule as well as the "final status" ones which had been left to the end precisely because they were so intractable - into one climactic conclave. This would "end the 100-year conflict" at a stroke. In July 2000, at President Clinton's Camp David retreat, he laid before Arafat his take-it-or-leave-it historic compromise. In return for his solemnly abjuring all further claims on Israel, Israel would acquiesce in the emergence of a Palestine state. Or at least the pathetic travesty of one, covering even less than the 22% of the original homeland to which he had already agreed to confine it; without real sovereignty, East Jerusalem as its capital, or the return of refugees. Most of the detested, illegal settlements would remain.
After 15 days the conference collapsed. Arafat had stood firm, evidently deciding that it had been bad enough, and tactically ruinous, to cede historic goals temporarily; but quite another to cede them for all time, in the context of a final settlement. He might be Mr Palestine, but he had no Palestinian, Arab or Islamic mandate for ceding Jerusalem's sovereignty or abandoning the rights of four million refugees.
From this collapse grew the second intifada, essentially a popular revolt, first against the Israeli occupation and the realisation that the Oslo peace process would never bring it to an end, and, potentially, against Arafat and the Palestine Authority (PA) which had so long connived in the fiction that it could.
It took on its own life and momentum. Arafat was at best in nominal control; its true leaders were men of a younger generation such as Marwan Barghouti. As a member of the secular, mainstream Fatah organisation, he owed him formal allegiance, but his growing popularity, partly stemming from the decline in his boss's, gave him a measure of autonomy. His objective was confined to ending the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and that being so, he confined his followers' attacks to the soldiers and settlers who were the symbols and instruments of it.
The intifada's other activists were the fundamentalists of Hamas and Islamic jihad. They did not oppose Arafat, but nor did they owe any allegiance to him. Their suicide exploits inside Israel proper betokened the much larger meaning which the intifada carried for them: "complete liberation" to which, in his early years, Arafat had subscribed.
The death toll mounted beneath the overwhelmingly superior firepower the Israelis could bring to bear: from small-scale attrition of sniper and small arms fire, through systematic assassinations, to tanks, helicopter gunships and F16s unleashed on targets in densely populated civilian neighbourhoods. Poverty, hatred and despair mounted too.
Most Israelis saw the intifada as an existential threat. And they all blamed Arafat. For the peace-seeking left he had betrayed them and all their strivings, with a resort to violence just when a historic breakthrough seemed within grasp.
For the right, he had revealed himself once more as the unregenerate killer they always held him to be. This consensus led, in February 2001, to the rise of Ariel Sharon, the "hero" of Sabra and Shatila, at the head of Israel's most extreme, bellicose government in history.
Sharon had one ambition: to suppress the intifada by as much brute force as he could risk without antagonising the Americans or his Labour coalition partners beyond endurance. And he did not mind if in the process he was to bring Arafat and the PA down; he would escape from any obligation to pursue the peace process by eliminating the only party with whom he could pursue it.
Like Saddam's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, the events of September 11 2001 were another of those unforeseeable cataclysms that impinged on the Palestinian arena. This time Arafat was determined to put himself on the side of the angels. Endorsing America's "war on terror", he sought to end the intifada. His police arrested militants who broke the ceasefire and shot and killed demonstrators who protested against the Anglo-American assault on Afghanistan.
But it did not yield the tangible gain from the Americans in the shape of a serious, impartial peace initiative at last, on which he was banking. On the contrary, after a brief and humiliating attempt, under Arab pressure, to rein Sharon in, George Bush II, the most pro-Israeli president ever, did little more than look on as he re-conquered much of the West Bank, wreaked havoc on the infrastructure of the PA, and subjected Arafat himself to a humiliating siege in his headquarters in Ramallah. Only Arafat's office was left standing amid mounds of rubble.
In the summer of 2002, Bush pronounced Arafat unfit to rule - as "irrelevant", in other words, as Sharon said he was - and a prime target, along with Saddam Hussein, for those "regime changes" which Bush now envisaged across much of the Middle East.
In 2003, after overthrowing Saddam through full-scale war, he sought to oust Arafat by diplomatic, less dramatic means. He secured the appointment of a docile prime minister, Abu Mazin, who he hoped was ready to do what Arafat was not - go to war against the Islamic militants without any assurance that in return the Israelis would make any worthwhile concessions in the peace-making.
But Arafat, with his continued grip on the levers of power, joined Sharon, with his intransigence and continued "targeted killings", and drove the hapless and unpopular appointee to despair and resignation. With the total breakdown of the ceasefire that had come with the latest "road map", and a resumption of the suicide bombings, the Israeli government announced its intention to "remove" Arafat, this "absolute obstacle to any attempt at reconciliation between Palestinians and Israelis."
"Removal" to a new exile or removal to "the other world" - that was the question. But this time the great survivor survived only to be carried off by what for him was the most extraordinary, because ordinary, of deaths.
Yasser Arafat (Muhammad Abdul Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini), politician, born August 4 1929; died November 11 2004
He plunged into preparation for the coming struggle - convinced that if Palestinians relied on others to decide for them, they would never recover their homeland. They had no decision-making institutions, so he set about creating them. He took over the stagnant Cairo-based League Of Palestinian Students.
Tireless, wily, domineering, he exhibited another vital trait which helped shape his career, and, through it, the history of the Middle East. At a congress in Prague, he suddenly donned the keffiyeh, or traditional chequered head-dress, which, as well as hiding his entirely bald pate, became his emblem. The gesture sprang from his delight in surprise, showmanship and the theatrical gesture. Style is often the man, and there was surely an intrinsic affinity between this and a remarkable ability to adapt himself and his movement, suddenly, spectacularly, to new goals and policies in a changing strategic and political environment.
In Prague, the 26-year-old student was already advertising his sense of destiny, referring to himself, only half-jokingly perhaps, as "Mr Palestine". And yet, like many contemporaries, he might well have eschewed politics altogether, and become a self-made man of a more conventional kind. Armed with a Cairo university engineering degree, he went to Kuwait in 1958, one of those stateless Palestinians searching for work in the remote, uncomfortable, undeveloped, but newly oil-rich British-protected emirate. He began as a public works department junior site engineer. Then he set up his own company, subsequently claiming that he had been "well on the way to becoming a millionaire".
An exaggeration, perhaps, but his brief business foray later consolidated a carefully cultivated, if genuine, aspect of his personality. As the leader of his people, he disposed of billions and made canny use of them as an instrument of policy and patronage, but led the most spartan of private lives. Similarly, for all his reputed liaisons with women, he could claim that, at great cost in contentment, his only marriage was to his Revolution.
Helped by the funds which his dalliance with material things procured him, he took the first, clandestine steps that led to his emergence as one of the household names of the age: the incarnation, however flawed, of all their aspirations to most Palestinians; of evil and the would-be destruction of their state to most Israelis; of their most sacred, exasperating, and unavoidable obligations to most Arab regimes; of a gradual conversion from "terrorist" to politician, even statesman, in the eyes of an outside world.
In Kuwait, in 1959, with his close friend Abu Jihad, he began publishing a crudely edited magazine, Our Palestine, which, with impetuous and uncouth vigour, lamented the Palestinian refugees' plight and the inaction of Arab regimes, and trumpeted the ideal of the Return, with a full-scale "population liberation war" as the only means of achieving it. Together they formed the Fatah guerrilla organisation's first, five-man underground cell. On January 1 1965, ill-trained, pitifully short of both weapons and funds, the Feyadeen (those who sacrifice themselves), mounted their first trans-frontier raid into the "Zionist gangster-state".
Arafat's guerrillas were always a much greater challenge to the Arab regimes than they were to the Israelis. In theory, the regimes too were preparing to liberate Palestine - but by conventional military means in their own good time. The first "martyr" fell victim, characteristically, to the Jordanian army. Upon his return from a raid, Arafat himself had a spell in a Syrian jail, amid rumours that the new Syrian defence minister, one Hafiz al-Assad, wanted to hang him and all his comrades.
These early Arafat exploits, though mere pinpricks, gave Israel another reason to fight a war that would end with the country gaining the remaining 22% of Palestine - East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza - which had eluded it in its "war of independence". Even after the shattering Arab defeat in the 1967 war, his guerrillas never put down roots in the newly occupied territories, let alone original Israel proper. Arafat is said to have made his getaway across the Jordan river disguised as a mother carrying a baby, a story that reinforced his growing reputation for the narrow escape and an uncanny sense of survival.
After the battle of Karameh, a small Jordanian town in which, on March 21 1968, an ill-armed band of guerrillas inflicted heavy casualties on a vastly superior force of Israeli invaders, the Fedayeen became the Arab world's darlings. Volunteers flocked to join it and Fatah became a state within the Jordanian state, with Arafat as its "spokesman". Soon he became chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), that assembly of generally docile notables which Egypt's President Nasser had established in 1964 as a way of keeping in check just such ardent young men as himself.
Too many fledgling "freedom-fighters" took to swaggering around the Jordanian capital Amman, advertising their ambition to replace the Hashemite kingdom with their own revolutionary order - and Arafat fell victim to his sudden, meteoric success. His movement suffered from organic defects typical of too-rapid growth - together with those of his individualistic, haphazard leadership style. In "Black September", 1970, King Hussein unleashed his Bedouin soldiers against him - an Arab army dealing Arafat the first of his great reverses.
In a new Lebanese exile, exploiting that country's divisions, he built himself a stronger power base. Yet he was now further from his natural Palestinian environment and his goal of "complete liberation" through "armed struggle". After the 1973 Arab-Israeli war and the partial Arab military comeback that engendered a serious bout of American peace-making, he began edging away from "revolution till victory" towards a "doctrine of stages". He sought what immediate gains he could from a political settlement without renouncing the historical right to all of Palestine. It was the beginning of a moderation that was to take further him than he could have imagined.
For a while his diplomatic successes overshadowed his military ones. In 1974, King Hussein, his historic Arab rival, recognised the PLO as "the sole legitimate spokesman of the Palestinian people". Two weeks later, he addressed the United Nations general assembly at its first full-dress debate on the "Palestine question" since 1952, becoming the first leader of a "national liberation movement" to be so honoured.
That triumph was followed by a dreary period of diplomatic stagnation - and more military-strategic reverses, inflicted first by Arabs, then Israelis, then Arabs again. He took sides in the Lebanese civil war. When his proteges, the Muslim-leftists, were getting the upper hand, Syria's President Assad switched sides, sending in his army to help the right-wing Christian Phalangists. The civil war's first phase ended in 1976 with the atrocious siege and fall of the Palestinian refugee camp of Tal al-Zaatar. At an emergency summit, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait rescued Arafat from Syrian onslaughts.
In 1982 it was the Israelis who invaded Lebanon. In the three-month siege of Beirut, they hunted the PLO leader in person, using F15s as flying assassination squads while their quarry slept on the beach and in parks to evade them. Two hundred people died when, with a laser-guided vacuum bomb, they flattened an apartment block he had left moments before.
With the loss of his last Lebanese politico-military power base, Tunis became his headquarters. Though the Phalangist pogrom of defenceless refugees in the camps of Sabra and Shatila followed his exile, these were not his personally bleakest moments. They came 15 months later after he had slipped back into the Syrian-controlled part of Lebanon, where Assad had helped foment a rebellion against him in the ranks of what was left of the Fatah guerrillas.
Arafat's bold stroke failed: bombarded by Israel from the sea, besieged by Syria, he sailed from Tripoli under a European-arranged safe passage. "Such," prematurely declared the New York Times, "is the bizarre ending of a movement that, for all its daring, never found a political vision."
Three years of seemingly growing irrelevance did indeed lie ahead. And in 1985 Israeli F15s killed 73 people at his seafront Tunis headquarters. His nose for danger had supposedly saved him yet again: he had been out "jogging" at the time. But his political fortunes were sinking to their lowest ebb - at Arab hands. At a 1987 summit, to his fury, Arab leaders for the first time put something other than Palestine - the Iraq-Iran war - at the top of their agenda.
But within weeks the great survivor was savouring a sweet recovery. With the spontaneous, non-armed intifada as his new asset, he found himself in a stronger position than the long, costly "armed struggle" ever conferred on him; the stones that youngsters hurled at Israeli soldiers were more potent than Kalashnikovs. In 1988, he solemnly proclaimed his adherence to the "two-state" solution, involving the Palestinians' renunciation of 78% of their original homeland. He recognised Israel's right to exist. There began a long dreamt of US-PLO dialogue; he called it the Palestinians' "passport to the world".
His historic offer was a delusion, a failed gamble, such was the continuing weakness of Palestinians - and Arabs. For Israel, he was the unregenerate terrorist; and Washington would not gainsay its protege.
To enhance his bargaining power he looked more to a militarily powerful, increasingly militant Iraq. And when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, he backed him, a fatuous miscalculation. In American eyes he forfeited much of the moral and diplomatic respectability he had slowly garnered. If he had taken the other side, he would have been better placed to secure Palestine's place in the "new world order" the US sought to bring into being.
Still, it was a measure of his personal ascendancy that he persuaded the Palestinians to go to the 1991 Madrid peace conference, the first time Israel and its Arab neighbours had talked to each other across a table. But they did so at the price of historic concessions. The Israelis chose which Palestinians they talked to: there was no place for PLO members, let alone Arafat, in the Palestinian delegation. They also largely set the agenda; the Americans backed their refusal to discuss anything suggesting the Palestinians might benefit from such a fundamental 20th-century right as "self-determination".
Madrid got nowhere. It became tempting to speculate that he was tiring of his devotion to the revolution, when, at 62, and to the often disapproving surprise of his people, he took a 28-year-old Palestinian Christian wife, Suha Tawil. Tempting, but wrong. He kept up his endlessly airborne routine. In 1992, his aircraft crash-landed during a Libyan sandstorm. The crew sacrificed themselves to save him - testimony to the loyalty he inspired.
One Jerusalem newspaper called his escape a "heavenly referendum"; for many Palestinians, the relief and joy was genuine enough. Yet before long it was the Israelis who, though they could never love him, re-cast him as an enemy who gave them much more than they had dared to hope.
He began the secret talks that astonished the world as the Oslo agreement. Some of his officials whispered that the crash, the shock it caused to faculties already going awry, had pushed him into this last extremity of "moderation". Weaknesses in Arafat the man now impinged, as never before, on the cause he embodied. Individualism, vanity, deviousness, authoritarianism, a mystical belief in his infallibility had long been apparent. But now it became clear just how primary a concern to Mr Palestine was the destiny of - Mr Palestine. What he wanted, and was ready to pay almost any price to secure, was to come back into the game from which the terms of the Madrid conference, the rise of the "insider" leadership, and the appeal of Hamas fundamentalists, threatened to exclude him.
In one stroke, he did come back. On September 13 1993 he won his accolade as a world statesman. In the signing ceremony on the White House lawn, the 64-year-old former "terrorist" chieftain shook hands with Yitzhak Rabin, prime minister of the Jewish state which he had once made it his mission to remove from the earth.
The price was immense. He claimed that, with Oslo, he had set in train a momentum inexorably leading to Israel's withdrawal from all the occupied territories; the Palestinians were on the road to statehood; he saw the beckoning spires and minarets of its capital, East Jerusalem.
Nine months later he did at least achieve a strictly physical proximity to them. He returned "home". But the self-governing areas he returned to were the merest fragments, in Jericho and Gaza, not merely of original 1948 Palestine, but of the post-1967 22% of it on which he was to build his state. And he came as collaborator as much as liberator.
Oslo provided for a series of "interim" agreements leading to "final-status" talks. An Israeli commentator said of the first of them: "when one looks through all the lofty phraseology, all the deliberate disinformation, the hundreds of pettifogging sections, sub-sections, appendices and protocols, one clearly recognises that the Israeli victory was absolute and Palestine defeat abject."
It went on like this for six years, long after it had become obvious that his "momentum" was working against, not for him. It had been bound to do so, because, in this dispensation that outlawed violence, spurned UN jurisprudence on the conflict, and consecrated a congenitally pro-Israeli US as sole arbiter of the peace process, the balance of power was more overwhelmingly in Israel's favour than ever. The "interim" agreements which should have advanced his conception of "final status" only advanced the Israelis' conception.
Meanwhile he was grievously wanting in that other great, complementary task - the building of his state in the making. His vaunted Palestinian "democracy" was no different from the Arab regimes he had so excoriated for the abuse of his own people and their own. More people were then dying, under torture and maltreatment, in Palestinian jails than in Israeli ones. His unofficial economic "advisers" threw up a ramshackle, nepotistic edifice of monopoly, racketeering and naked extortion which enriched them as it further impoverished society at large, and - being so inefficient - reduced the economic base for all. In 1999, unprecedentedly, 20 leading citizens denounced not just high officials and their business cronies, but the "president", who had "opened the doors to the opportunists to spread their rottenness through the Palestinian street".
With his fortunes again at such a dangerous low ebb, he was approaching another critical point: persist in policies and methods which were slowly undoing him, or revert, to some form of a strategy of militancy and confrontation - and rely anew on the support of his people, rather than the favour of the US, to carry it off. But it was less he, than Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, who imposed this choice.
Barak conceived the fantastically overweening notion of telescoping everything - the "interim" stages which had fallen hopelessly behind schedule as well as the "final status" ones which had been left to the end precisely because they were so intractable - into one climactic conclave. This would "end the 100-year conflict" at a stroke. In July 2000, at President Clinton's Camp David retreat, he laid before Arafat his take-it-or-leave-it historic compromise. In return for his solemnly abjuring all further claims on Israel, Israel would acquiesce in the emergence of a Palestine state. Or at least the pathetic travesty of one, covering even less than the 22% of the original homeland to which he had already agreed to confine it; without real sovereignty, East Jerusalem as its capital, or the return of refugees. Most of the detested, illegal settlements would remain.
After 15 days the conference collapsed. Arafat had stood firm, evidently deciding that it had been bad enough, and tactically ruinous, to cede historic goals temporarily; but quite another to cede them for all time, in the context of a final settlement. He might be Mr Palestine, but he had no Palestinian, Arab or Islamic mandate for ceding Jerusalem's sovereignty or abandoning the rights of four million refugees.
From this collapse grew the second intifada, essentially a popular revolt, first against the Israeli occupation and the realisation that the Oslo peace process would never bring it to an end, and, potentially, against Arafat and the Palestine Authority (PA) which had so long connived in the fiction that it could.
It took on its own life and momentum. Arafat was at best in nominal control; its true leaders were men of a younger generation such as Marwan Barghouti. As a member of the secular, mainstream Fatah organisation, he owed him formal allegiance, but his growing popularity, partly stemming from the decline in his boss's, gave him a measure of autonomy. His objective was confined to ending the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and that being so, he confined his followers' attacks to the soldiers and settlers who were the symbols and instruments of it.
The intifada's other activists were the fundamentalists of Hamas and Islamic jihad. They did not oppose Arafat, but nor did they owe any allegiance to him. Their suicide exploits inside Israel proper betokened the much larger meaning which the intifada carried for them: "complete liberation" to which, in his early years, Arafat had subscribed.
The death toll mounted beneath the overwhelmingly superior firepower the Israelis could bring to bear: from small-scale attrition of sniper and small arms fire, through systematic assassinations, to tanks, helicopter gunships and F16s unleashed on targets in densely populated civilian neighbourhoods. Poverty, hatred and despair mounted too.
Most Israelis saw the intifada as an existential threat. And they all blamed Arafat. For the peace-seeking left he had betrayed them and all their strivings, with a resort to violence just when a historic breakthrough seemed within grasp.
For the right, he had revealed himself once more as the unregenerate killer they always held him to be. This consensus led, in February 2001, to the rise of Ariel Sharon, the "hero" of Sabra and Shatila, at the head of Israel's most extreme, bellicose government in history.
Sharon had one ambition: to suppress the intifada by as much brute force as he could risk without antagonising the Americans or his Labour coalition partners beyond endurance. And he did not mind if in the process he was to bring Arafat and the PA down; he would escape from any obligation to pursue the peace process by eliminating the only party with whom he could pursue it.
Like Saddam's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, the events of September 11 2001 were another of those unforeseeable cataclysms that impinged on the Palestinian arena. This time Arafat was determined to put himself on the side of the angels. Endorsing America's "war on terror", he sought to end the intifada. His police arrested militants who broke the ceasefire and shot and killed demonstrators who protested against the Anglo-American assault on Afghanistan.
But it did not yield the tangible gain from the Americans in the shape of a serious, impartial peace initiative at last, on which he was banking. On the contrary, after a brief and humiliating attempt, under Arab pressure, to rein Sharon in, George Bush II, the most pro-Israeli president ever, did little more than look on as he re-conquered much of the West Bank, wreaked havoc on the infrastructure of the PA, and subjected Arafat himself to a humiliating siege in his headquarters in Ramallah. Only Arafat's office was left standing amid mounds of rubble.
In the summer of 2002, Bush pronounced Arafat unfit to rule - as "irrelevant", in other words, as Sharon said he was - and a prime target, along with Saddam Hussein, for those "regime changes" which Bush now envisaged across much of the Middle East.
In 2003, after overthrowing Saddam through full-scale war, he sought to oust Arafat by diplomatic, less dramatic means. He secured the appointment of a docile prime minister, Abu Mazin, who he hoped was ready to do what Arafat was not - go to war against the Islamic militants without any assurance that in return the Israelis would make any worthwhile concessions in the peace-making.
But Arafat, with his continued grip on the levers of power, joined Sharon, with his intransigence and continued "targeted killings", and drove the hapless and unpopular appointee to despair and resignation. With the total breakdown of the ceasefire that had come with the latest "road map", and a resumption of the suicide bombings, the Israeli government announced its intention to "remove" Arafat, this "absolute obstacle to any attempt at reconciliation between Palestinians and Israelis."
"Removal" to a new exile or removal to "the other world" - that was the question. But this time the great survivor survived only to be carried off by what for him was the most extraordinary, because ordinary, of deaths.
Yasser Arafat (Muhammad Abdul Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini), politician, born August 4 1929; died November 11 2004
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's coffin, draped with the Palestinian flag, is carried by a French military honour guard
Yasser Arafat's body arrived in Egypt tonight as authorities prepared for a strictly controlled and brief military funeral where dignitaries from around the world will pay their respects. But the people - among whom the Palestinian leader was popular - will be mostly shut out of Friday's funeral.
A plane carrying Mr Arafat's coffin arrived at Cairo airport late Thursday from a Paris military base. A military honour guard carried the coffin, walking in formation from the plane to a hearse.
Mr Arafat's 25-minute funeral at a military club near the airport, scheduled for late Friday morning, reflects concern for security at an event that will draw dozens of statesmen and foreign ministers. Analysts say Egypt also sought to avoid an outpouring of public emotion that might either get out of control or show that the late Palestinian leader enjoyed more support than other Arab leaders.
Earlier today at a Paris military base, the 75-year-old Palestinian leader was honoured with the first of the ceremonies marking his death. Eight pall bearers carried his flag-draped coffin past an honour guard as a military band played the French and Palestinian national anthems and a Chopin funeral march.
Arafat's widow, Suha, stifled sobs as her husband's coffin was transferred from a French military helicopter to an official French aircraft headed to Egypt for his funeral service.
Palestinians poured onto the streets of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, where flags were lowered to half mast, at the news of Mr Arafat's death.
World leaders paid tribute to the 75-year-old Palestinian leader, while his old enemy, the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, described his death as an "turning point" in the history of the Middle East.
As Palestinians mourned their leader of 30 years, Israeli soldiers killed four Palestinians in violent confrontations. Three Palestinians were killed, at least two of them gunmen, in fighting that erupted when militants from an armed group in Arafat's Fatah faction attacked a Jewish settlement in central Gaza after learning of the Palestinian leader's death. Israeli soldiers killed one of the gunmen.
The Palestinian leadership acted quickly to fill the power vacuum, but Mr Arafat will not be replaced by one individual.
Farouk Kaddoumi, a hardliner, was announced as Mr Arafat's successor as the head of the nationalist Fatah movement. He said he was open to peace negotiations with Israel, but also ready to pursue armed struggle if they failed.
The former Palestinian prime minister Mahmoud Abbas was named as the new head of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation. Mr Abbas is unlikely to face a challenger in the Palestinian Authority's presidential elections, which must be held within the next 60 days.
The speaker of the Palestinian parliament, Rauhi Fattouh, was sworn in as caretaker president.
Meanwhile the militant al-Aqsa Martyr Brigades announced it had changed its name in honour of Mr Arafat. It will now be known as the Martyr Yasser Arafat Brigades.
Fearing widespread Palestinian riots in the coming days, Israel sealed off the West Bank and Gaza Strip and sent in 1,600 troop reinforcements, the military said.
On October 29, after a serious deterioration in his health, Mr Arafat flew out of his West Bank compound in Ramallah, where he had been a virtual prisoner of the Israeli army for the last two years.
He was taken to the French military hospital Percy, in the Paris suburb of Clamart, for treatment, but was thought to have suffered a brain haemorrhage on Tuesday.
The hospital's chief doctor and spokesman, Christian Estripeau, announced his death at 3.30am local time today (0230 GMT). He did not comment on the exact cause of death.
The Israeli government vetoed a burial at Jerusalem's al-Asqa mosque, Islam's third holiest site, fearing it would undermine its claim to the city. Palestinian leaders, however, revealed that Mr Arafat will be buried in a stone coffin, not a wooden one, to allow his re-interment at a later time in Jerusalem.
"The final resting place will be the al-Aqsa Mosque," said Mr Erekat. "One of these days, we will have a Palestinian state, and President Arafat will be laid to rest [in Jerusalem]."
Israeli troop reinforcements were sent to checkpoints around Ramallah today. Soldiers were ordered not to express happiness at the death of a man who was reviled by many Israelis as a terrorist.
The prime minister, Tony Blair is meeting the US president, George Bush, later today to discuss the Middle East peace process.
Mr Blair sent his condolences to Mr Arafat's family and said that the Palestinian leader "came to symbolise the Palestinian national movement".
President Bush also expressed his "condolences to the Palestinian people".
"For the Palestinian people, we hope that the future will bring peace and the fulfilment of their aspirations for an independent, democratic Palestine that is at peace with its neighbours," he said.
The Israeli justice minister, Yosef Lapid, meanwhile, expressed many Israelis' attitude toward Mr Arafat. "I hated him for the deaths of Israelis ... I hated him for not allowing the peace process ... to move forward," he said.
In the Jebaliya refugee camp, Gaza's largest, students and supporters of Arafat's Fatah movement gathered in shock and sadness after learning of his death.
"Yasser Arafat is inside in our hearts - in the hearts of the real nation of Palestine," said Amar Muheisen, as he beat his chest with his fists. "Yasser Arafat will never die."
Children, already out of school for a Muslim holiday, ran through the streets, swept up in the frenzy. One 14-year-old named Ali, who refused to give his last name, wrapped a fist around a photograph of the late leader, who was waving his hand and smiling.
He shouted a famous Arafat quote, "the mountain cannot be shaken by the wind", and ran through the streets.
Outside her tiny home in the Jebaliya camp, Namia Abu-Safia, 48, wiped away her tears and told how she felt as if a member of her own family had died. "He is our father," she said, sobbing. "He is Palestine."
Yasser Arafat's body arrived in Egypt tonight as authorities prepared for a strictly controlled and brief military funeral where dignitaries from around the world will pay their respects. But the people - among whom the Palestinian leader was popular - will be mostly shut out of Friday's funeral.
A plane carrying Mr Arafat's coffin arrived at Cairo airport late Thursday from a Paris military base. A military honour guard carried the coffin, walking in formation from the plane to a hearse.
Mr Arafat's 25-minute funeral at a military club near the airport, scheduled for late Friday morning, reflects concern for security at an event that will draw dozens of statesmen and foreign ministers. Analysts say Egypt also sought to avoid an outpouring of public emotion that might either get out of control or show that the late Palestinian leader enjoyed more support than other Arab leaders.
Earlier today at a Paris military base, the 75-year-old Palestinian leader was honoured with the first of the ceremonies marking his death. Eight pall bearers carried his flag-draped coffin past an honour guard as a military band played the French and Palestinian national anthems and a Chopin funeral march.
Arafat's widow, Suha, stifled sobs as her husband's coffin was transferred from a French military helicopter to an official French aircraft headed to Egypt for his funeral service.
Palestinians poured onto the streets of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, where flags were lowered to half mast, at the news of Mr Arafat's death.
World leaders paid tribute to the 75-year-old Palestinian leader, while his old enemy, the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, described his death as an "turning point" in the history of the Middle East.
As Palestinians mourned their leader of 30 years, Israeli soldiers killed four Palestinians in violent confrontations. Three Palestinians were killed, at least two of them gunmen, in fighting that erupted when militants from an armed group in Arafat's Fatah faction attacked a Jewish settlement in central Gaza after learning of the Palestinian leader's death. Israeli soldiers killed one of the gunmen.
The Palestinian leadership acted quickly to fill the power vacuum, but Mr Arafat will not be replaced by one individual.
Farouk Kaddoumi, a hardliner, was announced as Mr Arafat's successor as the head of the nationalist Fatah movement. He said he was open to peace negotiations with Israel, but also ready to pursue armed struggle if they failed.
The former Palestinian prime minister Mahmoud Abbas was named as the new head of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation. Mr Abbas is unlikely to face a challenger in the Palestinian Authority's presidential elections, which must be held within the next 60 days.
The speaker of the Palestinian parliament, Rauhi Fattouh, was sworn in as caretaker president.
Meanwhile the militant al-Aqsa Martyr Brigades announced it had changed its name in honour of Mr Arafat. It will now be known as the Martyr Yasser Arafat Brigades.
Fearing widespread Palestinian riots in the coming days, Israel sealed off the West Bank and Gaza Strip and sent in 1,600 troop reinforcements, the military said.
On October 29, after a serious deterioration in his health, Mr Arafat flew out of his West Bank compound in Ramallah, where he had been a virtual prisoner of the Israeli army for the last two years.
He was taken to the French military hospital Percy, in the Paris suburb of Clamart, for treatment, but was thought to have suffered a brain haemorrhage on Tuesday.
The hospital's chief doctor and spokesman, Christian Estripeau, announced his death at 3.30am local time today (0230 GMT). He did not comment on the exact cause of death.
The Israeli government vetoed a burial at Jerusalem's al-Asqa mosque, Islam's third holiest site, fearing it would undermine its claim to the city. Palestinian leaders, however, revealed that Mr Arafat will be buried in a stone coffin, not a wooden one, to allow his re-interment at a later time in Jerusalem.
"The final resting place will be the al-Aqsa Mosque," said Mr Erekat. "One of these days, we will have a Palestinian state, and President Arafat will be laid to rest [in Jerusalem]."
Israeli troop reinforcements were sent to checkpoints around Ramallah today. Soldiers were ordered not to express happiness at the death of a man who was reviled by many Israelis as a terrorist.
The prime minister, Tony Blair is meeting the US president, George Bush, later today to discuss the Middle East peace process.
Mr Blair sent his condolences to Mr Arafat's family and said that the Palestinian leader "came to symbolise the Palestinian national movement".
President Bush also expressed his "condolences to the Palestinian people".
"For the Palestinian people, we hope that the future will bring peace and the fulfilment of their aspirations for an independent, democratic Palestine that is at peace with its neighbours," he said.
The Israeli justice minister, Yosef Lapid, meanwhile, expressed many Israelis' attitude toward Mr Arafat. "I hated him for the deaths of Israelis ... I hated him for not allowing the peace process ... to move forward," he said.
In the Jebaliya refugee camp, Gaza's largest, students and supporters of Arafat's Fatah movement gathered in shock and sadness after learning of his death.
"Yasser Arafat is inside in our hearts - in the hearts of the real nation of Palestine," said Amar Muheisen, as he beat his chest with his fists. "Yasser Arafat will never die."
Children, already out of school for a Muslim holiday, ran through the streets, swept up in the frenzy. One 14-year-old named Ali, who refused to give his last name, wrapped a fist around a photograph of the late leader, who was waving his hand and smiling.
He shouted a famous Arafat quote, "the mountain cannot be shaken by the wind", and ran through the streets.
Outside her tiny home in the Jebaliya camp, Namia Abu-Safia, 48, wiped away her tears and told how she felt as if a member of her own family had died. "He is our father," she said, sobbing. "He is Palestine."
Bulldozers began clearing a site for Yasser Arafat's burial yesterday inside the Ramallah compound that was effectively his prison for the past two years, as France's prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, said the Palestinian president was in his "final hours". Palestinian political and religious leaders continued to maintain that Mr Arafat, who has been in a critical condition for a week, was alive, though one senior official said most of his organs had failed.
Mr Raffarin told French television last night: "I hope that we can respect the final hours of a man who is approaching death."
Under pressure from the United States, Ariel Sharon's security cabinet approved Mr Arafat's burial at the Palestinian Authority's Ramallah headquarters after refusing a request for him to be laid to rest in Jerusalem's old city.
Israel had wanted Mr Arafat buried in a Gaza refugee camp but that was rejected as an attempt to diminish his significance.
Mr Arafat's Ramallah headquarters, the muqata, has great symbolism as a place of resistance after the Palestinian leader endured months of siege under Israeli guns and more than two years of confinement there.
Avraham Poraz, Israel's interior minister, said the government would permit Palestinians from across the West Bank and a small delegation from the Gaza Strip to attend the funeral.
"We have no desire to provoke the Palestinian street or the Arab world, or the rest of the world," Mr Poraz said. "So when the man dies, we have to allow them to mourn him. In their eyes he's a hero."
Israeli officials said Mr Sharon was preparing to make a statement after a formal announcement of Mr Arafat's death offering a fresh start with the Palestinians.
An official said the government has been impressed with the calm of the last few days in the occupied territories and the dignity with which the Palestinian leadership has conducted itself.
US president George Bush said last night that a new leadership could provide a fresh impetus for peace. "I think we've got a chance," he said.
The head of the Islamic court in the Palestinian territories, Sheikh Taissir Dayut Tamimi, sat at Mr Arafat's bedside reading Quranic verses yesterday in the Paris hospital where he was evacuated last week.
Mystery has surrounded Mr Arafat's diagnosis, but the Palestinian foreign minister, Nabil Shaath, said his brain was only partly functioning following a haemorrhage, and that all other organs apart from heart and lungs were "not functioning well".
The Palestinian Authority's envoy to Paris, Leila Shahid, said reports of Mr Arafat's death were "Israeli disinformation, designed to destabilise the situation in Palestine".
Asked why they were making funeral preparations in Ramallah, she said: "We are facing a major event in the history of the Palestinian Authority. It is our duty to take all the measures needed for all eventualities."
Palestinian leaders have agreed that when Mr Arafat dies his body will be flown to Cairo to lie in state.
Among those expected to attend are world leaders including the former US president, Bill Clinton, the French president, Jacques Chirac, and Nelson Mandela if he is able. The foreign secretary, Jack Straw, would represent Britain.
Palestinian leaders agreed yesterday to abide by the law that requires the speaker of parliament, Rauhi Fattouh, to take over as acting president of the Palestinian Authority when Mr Arafat dies and for elections to be held within 60 days. Some factions oppose a ballot because of the limits on movement caused by the Israeli occupation.
Mr Raffarin told French television last night: "I hope that we can respect the final hours of a man who is approaching death."
Under pressure from the United States, Ariel Sharon's security cabinet approved Mr Arafat's burial at the Palestinian Authority's Ramallah headquarters after refusing a request for him to be laid to rest in Jerusalem's old city.
Israel had wanted Mr Arafat buried in a Gaza refugee camp but that was rejected as an attempt to diminish his significance.
Mr Arafat's Ramallah headquarters, the muqata, has great symbolism as a place of resistance after the Palestinian leader endured months of siege under Israeli guns and more than two years of confinement there.
Avraham Poraz, Israel's interior minister, said the government would permit Palestinians from across the West Bank and a small delegation from the Gaza Strip to attend the funeral.
"We have no desire to provoke the Palestinian street or the Arab world, or the rest of the world," Mr Poraz said. "So when the man dies, we have to allow them to mourn him. In their eyes he's a hero."
Israeli officials said Mr Sharon was preparing to make a statement after a formal announcement of Mr Arafat's death offering a fresh start with the Palestinians.
An official said the government has been impressed with the calm of the last few days in the occupied territories and the dignity with which the Palestinian leadership has conducted itself.
US president George Bush said last night that a new leadership could provide a fresh impetus for peace. "I think we've got a chance," he said.
The head of the Islamic court in the Palestinian territories, Sheikh Taissir Dayut Tamimi, sat at Mr Arafat's bedside reading Quranic verses yesterday in the Paris hospital where he was evacuated last week.
Mystery has surrounded Mr Arafat's diagnosis, but the Palestinian foreign minister, Nabil Shaath, said his brain was only partly functioning following a haemorrhage, and that all other organs apart from heart and lungs were "not functioning well".
The Palestinian Authority's envoy to Paris, Leila Shahid, said reports of Mr Arafat's death were "Israeli disinformation, designed to destabilise the situation in Palestine".
Asked why they were making funeral preparations in Ramallah, she said: "We are facing a major event in the history of the Palestinian Authority. It is our duty to take all the measures needed for all eventualities."
Palestinian leaders have agreed that when Mr Arafat dies his body will be flown to Cairo to lie in state.
Among those expected to attend are world leaders including the former US president, Bill Clinton, the French president, Jacques Chirac, and Nelson Mandela if he is able. The foreign secretary, Jack Straw, would represent Britain.
Palestinian leaders agreed yesterday to abide by the law that requires the speaker of parliament, Rauhi Fattouh, to take over as acting president of the Palestinian Authority when Mr Arafat dies and for elections to be held within 60 days. Some factions oppose a ballot because of the limits on movement caused by the Israeli occupation.
10 nov 2004
The Israeli finance minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, yesterday withdrew his threat to resign over the proposed Israeli pullout from Gaza and claimed his about-turn was because of the expected demise of Yasser Arafat. Mr Netanyahu is Mr Sharon's main rival in the Likud party and his departure would have begun a bout of serious infighting for the leadership.
His decision came on the day that Mr Sharon lost an overall majority in the Knesset. The six members of the pro-settler National Religious party carried out their threat to leave the government coalition over the withdrawal plan.
Mr Sharon is left with a coalition government of only 55 members in the 120-seat Knesset. He is expected to enter into negotiations with the Labour party to persuade them to join him, a move that would bring Shimon Peres back into government.
Mr Netanyahu, though still the likeliest successor to Mr Sharon as Likud leader, will have lost a lot of credibility with the right wing of the party for his failure to resign. He will also have lost outright a lot of the support he enjoyed from the settler movement.
Rightwingers in the Likud party as well as the settlers pressed Mr Netanyahu to resign and openly challenge Mr Sharon for the leadership.
Mr Netanyahu had been pressing Mr Sharon to hold a referendum on the Gaza plan and issued an ultimatum two weeks ago, but the prime minister refused to budge, claiming it would delay the pullout by up to a year.
Climbing down yesterday, Mr Netanyahu said: "The expected departure of Arafat from the Palestinian leadership creates a new situation." He said Mr Arafat's demise would mean the unilateral disengagement plan needed to be reviewed.
"A [Palestinian] power struggle could develop, and we need to wait patiently for it to end."
At a heated Likud meeting on Monday night, Mr Sharon offered Mr Netanyahu a sop by referring the issue of a referendum to a parliamentary committee, where it is likely to fade away. Mr Netanyahu did not dwell on this compromise yesterday, but instead chose to tie his decision to Mr Arafat's demise.
His decision came on the day that Mr Sharon lost an overall majority in the Knesset. The six members of the pro-settler National Religious party carried out their threat to leave the government coalition over the withdrawal plan.
Mr Sharon is left with a coalition government of only 55 members in the 120-seat Knesset. He is expected to enter into negotiations with the Labour party to persuade them to join him, a move that would bring Shimon Peres back into government.
Mr Netanyahu, though still the likeliest successor to Mr Sharon as Likud leader, will have lost a lot of credibility with the right wing of the party for his failure to resign. He will also have lost outright a lot of the support he enjoyed from the settler movement.
Rightwingers in the Likud party as well as the settlers pressed Mr Netanyahu to resign and openly challenge Mr Sharon for the leadership.
Mr Netanyahu had been pressing Mr Sharon to hold a referendum on the Gaza plan and issued an ultimatum two weeks ago, but the prime minister refused to budge, claiming it would delay the pullout by up to a year.
Climbing down yesterday, Mr Netanyahu said: "The expected departure of Arafat from the Palestinian leadership creates a new situation." He said Mr Arafat's demise would mean the unilateral disengagement plan needed to be reviewed.
"A [Palestinian] power struggle could develop, and we need to wait patiently for it to end."
At a heated Likud meeting on Monday night, Mr Sharon offered Mr Netanyahu a sop by referring the issue of a referendum to a parliamentary committee, where it is likely to fade away. Mr Netanyahu did not dwell on this compromise yesterday, but instead chose to tie his decision to Mr Arafat's demise.
Palestinian officials said Yasser Arafat was close to death last night after suffering a brain haemorrhage and sinking deeper into a week-long coma.The Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qureia, visited Mr Arafat at a Paris military hospital to try to establish the true state of his health after two weeks of confusing and contradictory claims.
The Palestinian foreign minister, Nabil Shaath, who met doctors at the hospital but did not see Mr Arafat, said the delegation was not prepared to predict the Palestinian leader's death but it was not holding out hope of a swift recovery.
"The president is very ill," said Mr Shaath. "He has been in a coma and that coma has deepened last night. Having said that and having recognition of the critical situation that President Arafat is in today, his brain, his heart, his lungs still function and he is alive."
Mr Shaath said Mr Arafat is on a life support machine administering drugs and nutrients.
Saeb Erekat, the Palestinian chief negotiator, said in Ramallah that Mr Arafat had suffered a brain haemorrhage.
The deputy speaker of parliament, Hassan Khareisha, said that a meeting of senior Palestinian officials was told that Mr Arafat could die very soon.
"There were some who were crying when they heard this," he said.
Mr Khareisha also said that when the Palestinian leader dies he will be buried at his partially destroyed Ramallah headquarters, the muqata, in defiance of Israeli attempts to force the funeral to the Gaza Strip. Mr Arafat was a de facto prisoner of the Israelis at his headquarters for more than two years until he was flown to Paris.
Mr Shaath said the Palestinian leaders in Paris were "embraced" by Mr Arafat's wife, Suha, who had attempted to block the visit to her husband by accusing them of trying to "bury Mr Arafat alive".
The head of the Islamic court in the occupied territories, Taissir Dayut Tamimi, was travelling to Paris last night to be at Mr Arafat's side. Officials said he was going to offer legal and religious advice, and because there was a need for an Islamic declaration of death to remove any suspicion about how Mr Arafat may have died.
Earlier Mr Shaath dismissed speculation that the Palestinian leader might be deprived of life support.
"People talk as if his life is plugged in and plugged out. This is utterly ridiculous. We Muslims do not accept euthanasia," he said.
He added: "No such measure has ever been considered by his doctors or by his family. And so he will live or die depending on his body's ability to resist and of the will of God."
Mr Shaath was asked when Mr Arafat might be declared an "incapacitated president", thus triggering measures in the Palestinian constitution for appointing a new leader.
"There would have to be an independent medical inquiry to decide whether he is incapacitated and then that would have to go to the supreme court. We don't think it is really urgent to do that yet," he said.
Mr Shaath said doctors have still failed to establish what is afflicting Mr Arafat but have ruled out cancer and poisoning.
A meeting of Palestinian leaders last night agreed to defy Israeli attempts to dictate where Mr Arafat will be buried and insist that he is interred at the muqata, not in the Gaza Strip.
Mr Arafat has said he wishes to be interred at one of the most sacred sites in Islam, Haram as-Sharif, known to Jews as the Temple Mount, inside Jerusalem's old city.
But the Israeli government has ruled it out on the grounds that he is an "arch-terrorist" and should not be laid to rest in the holy city.
Israel has been trying to force a burial in the Gaza Strip by saying it has made preparations for Arab leaders and foreign dignitaries to travel there without passing through Israel.
But Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, said the burial would take place at the compound still strewn with rubble and crushed vehicles from the Israeli assault and siege in 2002.
"The muqata became the symbol of the steadfastness of the Palestinian people, the president's place of siege," he said.
Israel would be uncomfortable with a funeral at the muqata because of its symbolism in Palestinian resistance and because Mr Arafat's grave would implicitly lay claim to the West Bank as Palestinian territory. But diplomats said they thought it unlikely that Israel would prevent a funeral in Ramallah.
The Palestinian foreign minister, Nabil Shaath, who met doctors at the hospital but did not see Mr Arafat, said the delegation was not prepared to predict the Palestinian leader's death but it was not holding out hope of a swift recovery.
"The president is very ill," said Mr Shaath. "He has been in a coma and that coma has deepened last night. Having said that and having recognition of the critical situation that President Arafat is in today, his brain, his heart, his lungs still function and he is alive."
Mr Shaath said Mr Arafat is on a life support machine administering drugs and nutrients.
Saeb Erekat, the Palestinian chief negotiator, said in Ramallah that Mr Arafat had suffered a brain haemorrhage.
The deputy speaker of parliament, Hassan Khareisha, said that a meeting of senior Palestinian officials was told that Mr Arafat could die very soon.
"There were some who were crying when they heard this," he said.
Mr Khareisha also said that when the Palestinian leader dies he will be buried at his partially destroyed Ramallah headquarters, the muqata, in defiance of Israeli attempts to force the funeral to the Gaza Strip. Mr Arafat was a de facto prisoner of the Israelis at his headquarters for more than two years until he was flown to Paris.
Mr Shaath said the Palestinian leaders in Paris were "embraced" by Mr Arafat's wife, Suha, who had attempted to block the visit to her husband by accusing them of trying to "bury Mr Arafat alive".
The head of the Islamic court in the occupied territories, Taissir Dayut Tamimi, was travelling to Paris last night to be at Mr Arafat's side. Officials said he was going to offer legal and religious advice, and because there was a need for an Islamic declaration of death to remove any suspicion about how Mr Arafat may have died.
Earlier Mr Shaath dismissed speculation that the Palestinian leader might be deprived of life support.
"People talk as if his life is plugged in and plugged out. This is utterly ridiculous. We Muslims do not accept euthanasia," he said.
He added: "No such measure has ever been considered by his doctors or by his family. And so he will live or die depending on his body's ability to resist and of the will of God."
Mr Shaath was asked when Mr Arafat might be declared an "incapacitated president", thus triggering measures in the Palestinian constitution for appointing a new leader.
"There would have to be an independent medical inquiry to decide whether he is incapacitated and then that would have to go to the supreme court. We don't think it is really urgent to do that yet," he said.
Mr Shaath said doctors have still failed to establish what is afflicting Mr Arafat but have ruled out cancer and poisoning.
A meeting of Palestinian leaders last night agreed to defy Israeli attempts to dictate where Mr Arafat will be buried and insist that he is interred at the muqata, not in the Gaza Strip.
Mr Arafat has said he wishes to be interred at one of the most sacred sites in Islam, Haram as-Sharif, known to Jews as the Temple Mount, inside Jerusalem's old city.
But the Israeli government has ruled it out on the grounds that he is an "arch-terrorist" and should not be laid to rest in the holy city.
Israel has been trying to force a burial in the Gaza Strip by saying it has made preparations for Arab leaders and foreign dignitaries to travel there without passing through Israel.
But Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, said the burial would take place at the compound still strewn with rubble and crushed vehicles from the Israeli assault and siege in 2002.
"The muqata became the symbol of the steadfastness of the Palestinian people, the president's place of siege," he said.
Israel would be uncomfortable with a funeral at the muqata because of its symbolism in Palestinian resistance and because Mr Arafat's grave would implicitly lay claim to the West Bank as Palestinian territory. But diplomats said they thought it unlikely that Israel would prevent a funeral in Ramallah.
A Palestinian policeman stands near a portrait of ailing Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat at Arafat's compound in the West Bank
A senior Palestinian cleric arrived in France today and was rushing to Yasser Arafat's hospital bedside to be with him in the "final phase" of his life, according to a spokeswoman for the Palestinian leader.Taissir Dayut Tamimi, the head of the Islamic court in the occupied territories and a close friend of Mr Arafat, arrived in Paris on a private flight and was reportedly heading directly to the hospital.
The Palestinian envoy to France, Leila Shahid, told the radio station France-Info: "It is clear, as for a Christian, as for a Jew, that a religious man needs to be with his patient when he is in the final phase of his life. That is why he is here."
The comments appeared to confirm that Palestinian officials have accepted Mr Arafat's death could be imminent, despite a series of contradictory reports on his condition over the last few days.
The outlook worsened yesterday as doctors said Mr Arafat's coma had deepened and his caretaker government chose a burial site and began preparing for a funeral.
Today, those preparations appeared to be well advanced after Egypt agreed to host a state funeral in Cairo and the Israeli cabinet announced it would allow Mr Arafat to be buried in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
Israel Army Radio said the cabinet was still discussing security arrangements and other operational matters, but that burying Mr Arafat at his headquarters in Ramallah - as requested yesterday by the Palestinian caretaker government - would be acceptable in principle.
Initial suggestions that Mr Arafat be buried in Jerusalem were angrily rejected by the Israeli government.
There was no change in Mr Arafat's condition overnight, according to Palestinian cabinet minister Saeb Erekat. "The president is still alive and he's in a very critical condition," Mr Erekat told Associated Press.
At a press conference in Ramallah last night, Mr Erakat said Mr Arafat had suffered a severe brain haemorrhage, which can cause brain damage. "All efforts are being made by our friends the French doctors to relieve this haemorrhaging," he said.
Although Mr Arafat has been comatose for a week, attached to a respirator and feeding tubes, his aides have ruled out any suggestion of taking him off life support.
"He will live or die depending on his body's ability to resist and on the will of God," said Palestinian foreign minister Nabil Shaath, one of several officials who met yesterday with Mr Arafat's doctors, his wife and French president Jacques Chirac.
Meanwhile, the question of Mr Arafat's succession and other matters relating to his death were being taken up today by the central committee of the Fatah party and the Palestine Liberation Organisation's executive committee.
"Many issues related to Mr Arafat's burial, if he dies, have to be discussed," said Abbas Zaki, a Fatah central committee member.
A senior Palestinian cleric arrived in France today and was rushing to Yasser Arafat's hospital bedside to be with him in the "final phase" of his life, according to a spokeswoman for the Palestinian leader.Taissir Dayut Tamimi, the head of the Islamic court in the occupied territories and a close friend of Mr Arafat, arrived in Paris on a private flight and was reportedly heading directly to the hospital.
The Palestinian envoy to France, Leila Shahid, told the radio station France-Info: "It is clear, as for a Christian, as for a Jew, that a religious man needs to be with his patient when he is in the final phase of his life. That is why he is here."
The comments appeared to confirm that Palestinian officials have accepted Mr Arafat's death could be imminent, despite a series of contradictory reports on his condition over the last few days.
The outlook worsened yesterday as doctors said Mr Arafat's coma had deepened and his caretaker government chose a burial site and began preparing for a funeral.
Today, those preparations appeared to be well advanced after Egypt agreed to host a state funeral in Cairo and the Israeli cabinet announced it would allow Mr Arafat to be buried in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
Israel Army Radio said the cabinet was still discussing security arrangements and other operational matters, but that burying Mr Arafat at his headquarters in Ramallah - as requested yesterday by the Palestinian caretaker government - would be acceptable in principle.
Initial suggestions that Mr Arafat be buried in Jerusalem were angrily rejected by the Israeli government.
There was no change in Mr Arafat's condition overnight, according to Palestinian cabinet minister Saeb Erekat. "The president is still alive and he's in a very critical condition," Mr Erekat told Associated Press.
At a press conference in Ramallah last night, Mr Erakat said Mr Arafat had suffered a severe brain haemorrhage, which can cause brain damage. "All efforts are being made by our friends the French doctors to relieve this haemorrhaging," he said.
Although Mr Arafat has been comatose for a week, attached to a respirator and feeding tubes, his aides have ruled out any suggestion of taking him off life support.
"He will live or die depending on his body's ability to resist and on the will of God," said Palestinian foreign minister Nabil Shaath, one of several officials who met yesterday with Mr Arafat's doctors, his wife and French president Jacques Chirac.
Meanwhile, the question of Mr Arafat's succession and other matters relating to his death were being taken up today by the central committee of the Fatah party and the Palestine Liberation Organisation's executive committee.
"Many issues related to Mr Arafat's burial, if he dies, have to be discussed," said Abbas Zaki, a Fatah central committee member.