Arafat to get military funeral, burial in West Bank

CAIRO - Yasser Arafat will get a military funeral in Egypt on Friday before burial in the smashed West Bank compound where he spent his final years besieged by Israeli troops without realising his dream of a Palestinian state.

The Palestinian president, a former guerrilla who became a Third World liberation icon and won a Nobel Peace Prize only to sink into renewed conflict with Israel, died at age 75 in a French hospital on Thursday from an undetermined disease.

He left behind a people in a twilight zone between direct occupation and statehood, running their own affairs but surrounded and laid low by Israeli military crackdowns on a four-year-old revolt by Palestinian militants.

Palestinians named a collective leadership comprised mainly of veteran moderates in Arafat's circle, reviving world hopes of a return to peacemaking that Israel had ruled out as long as the man it called "a master terrorist" was in charge.

But his interim successors are likely to be challenged by a younger generation hardened by struggle with Israel and fed up with old guard corruption, raising concern over the future of diplomacy.

Arafat's coffin, accompanied by his widow Suha, arrived on a French jet late on Thursday in Cairo for the funeral in the city where biographers say he was born and where he launched his tumultuous career in the 1950s.

Scores of presidents, foreign ministers and royalty from around the world headed for the funeral, Arab leaders in particular because the venue would spare them Israeli border controls sealing the occupied West Bank and Gaza.

Among those expected to be at the 11am (0900 GMT) funeral at a mosque near Cairo's military airport are Presidents Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, Emile Lahoud of Lebanon and King Abdullah of Jordan.

The United States sent Assistant Secretary of State William Burns, in a slight attesting to its boycott of Arafat as an "obstacle to peace".

Israel dispatched no one at all. "I do not think we should send a representative to the funeral of somebody who killed thousands of our people," Justice Minister Yosef Lapid said.

After the funeral, Arafat's body is to be flown to the West Bank city of Ramallah for interment in the compound where Israeli forces penned him for 2-1/2 years until he fell gravely ill two weeks ago and was airlifted to Paris.

At the West Bank compound, workmen hastily cleared rubble of the compound that had been smashed by Israel and raced against the clock to complete a white marble gravesite for Arafat.

Israeli troops went on their highest security alert since a wave of suicide bombing in 2002, bracing for what they said could be attacks and rioting linked to the burial.

A senior Muslim cleric said Arafat would be laid to rest in a concrete coffin that could be moved later to nearby Jerusalem, where the Palestinian leader had asked to be buried.

Israel ruled out an Arafat grave in Arab East Jerusalem fearing this would strengthen Palestinians' claim to a capital in the part of the city captured by the Jewish state in the 1967 war and annexed in a move not recognised internationally.

Sheikh Ikrima Sabri, the Palestinian grand mufti of Jerusalem, said he would bring some sand from the site of Jerusalem's al-Aqsa mosque -- Islam's third holiest site -- to place on Arafat's body before the burial.

The Palestinian Authority declared a 40-day mourning period.

Arafat's death brought tens of thousands of Palestinians into the street in towns and refugee camps across the West Bank and Gaza. Many wailed in grief and bore portraits of their patriarch, one of the world's most recognisable leaders.

Hundreds of militants fired assault rifles into the air. In Gaza, youths burned tyres. Loudspeakers blared Koranic verses.

Within hours of Arafat's death, militants from his Fatah movement attacked a Jewish settlement in Gaza in what they said signalled the start of a new round of clashes with Israel. Soldiers killed three Palestinians, at least two of them gunmen.

With condolences for Arafat pouring in from across the globe, Palestinian officials urged Israel to revive stalled talks. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said it could be a "turning point" for peace if Arafat's successors ended violence.

But Sharon, signalling scant hope they would swing the Palestinian street behind peacemaking, also said he would pursue a unilateral plan to quit Gaza and keep much of the West Bank, stripping Palestinians of land they want for a viable state.

US President George W. Bush, who is meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair in Washington, was expected to outline his vision for a Middle East without Arafat later on Friday.

British officials said they did not expect an announcement of a new timetable for Middle East diplomacy to emerge from the talks. In June 2002, Bush outlined a peace plan supporting the founding of a Palestinian state, but only once the Palestinians ditched Arafat as their leader.

Arafat returned from exile in 1994 after interim peace deals that gave Palestinians limited self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza. He shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Israel's Shimon Peres, then foreign minister, and prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, later assassinated by a Jewish ultranationalist.

But a final peace summit failed in 2000, pitching the region back into bloodshed.

- REUTERS