The plane carrying Yasser Arafat's coffin has arrived in Cairo ahead of the Palestinian president's funeral tomorrow.
The iconic Palestinian leader, who died in Paris earlier this morning aged 75, will be buried in the West Bank city of Ramallah after a full state funeral in Egypt tomorrow.
The French military hospital where he had been treated since October 29th said he died at 3.30 a.m. The Palestinian leader spent his final days there in a coma; doctors would not disclose what ailment killed him.
"He closed his eyes and his big heart stopped. He left for God but he is still among this great people," said senior Arafat aide Tayeb Abdel Rahim, who broke into tears as he announced Mr Arafat's death.
Mr Arafat's widow, Suha, wept with her head bowed as eight soldiers walked down the French airfield tarmac bearing the coffin, draped in a large Palestinian flag.
She then followed her husband's coffin onto a waiting French jet at the Villacoublay airfield southwest of Paris.
Palestinian flags at Mr Arafat's battered Ramallah compound were lowered to half-mast as tens of thousands of Palestinians poured into the streets of the Gaza Strip in a show of grief at the start of 40 days of mourning.
Dozens of gunmen fired into the air, and marchers waved Palestinian flags. Mosques blared Quranic verses, children burned tyres on the main streets, and people pasted posters of Mr Arafat on building walls.
Senior Arafat aide Tayeb Abdel Rahim
A visual constant in his checkered keffiyeh headdress, Mr Arafat kept the Palestinians' cause at the centre of the Arab-Israeli conflict, but he fell short of creating a Palestinian state.
Moreover, along with other secular Arab leaders of his generation, he saw his influence weakened by the rise of radical Islam in recent years.
Mr Arafat became one of the world's most familiar faces after addressing the UN General Assembly in New York in 1974, when he entered the chamber wearing a holster and carrying a sprig.
"Today I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter's gun," he said. "Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand."
Two decades later, he shook hand at the White House with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on a peace deal that formally recognised Israel's right to exist while granting the Palestinians limited self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The pact led to the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize for Mr Arafat, Mr Rabin and Israeli Foreign Minister Mr Shimon Peres.
But the accord quickly unraveled following the provocative visit to the Temple Mount of then Israeli defence minister Mr Ariel Sharon, and a new round of violence erupted in 2000 that has killed some 4,000 people, three-quarters of them Palestinian killed by Israel.
The Israeli and US governments claimed Mr Arafat deserved much of the blame for the derailing of the peace process. Many Israelis felt Palestinian leader's real goal remained the destruction of the Jewish state.
Agencies
