Presidents and dignitaries from more than 50 countries flew into Cairo on Friday morning for a half-hour funeral service for the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, before his body was flown to his headquarters in Ramallah for burial.
On Thursday night, Palestinian workers were still preparing the grave site in the battered compound amid shattered buildings and crushed cars left from the Israeli siege two years ago.
The Palestinian leader is expected to be buried on Saturday in a concrete coffin — an unusual arrangement making it possible to move his body to Jerusalem at some later date without too much disturbance to his remains.
Doctors at the Percy military hospital in Paris, where Arafat (75) died early on Thursday after several days in a coma, did not reveal the cause of death, citing family confidentiality.
Israel sealed off the occupied territories ahead of the burial, sending thousands of troops into the area and barring Palestinians from praying at the al-Aqsa mosque, Islam’s third holiest site, in Jerusalem on Friday.
Palestinian leaders declared 40 days of mourning for the man who embodied four decades of struggle for a country but who was regarded by Israel as an arch-terrorist.
Some world leaders praised Arafat, including Tony Blair, who said the Palestinian leader had “led his people to an historic acceptance of the need for a two-state solution”.
Israel’s justice minister, Yosef Lapid, said the Jewish state would not send anyone to the funeral or burial: “I do not usually think we should send a representative to the funeral of somebody who killed thousands of our people.”
The prime minister, Ariel Sharon, has previously said he wanted Arafat removed as an obstacle to peace, and his Cabinet discussed exiling or even killing the Palestinian leader. On Thursday he said that the Palestinian leader’s death was an opportunity to resume the pursuit of peace, while managing not to mention Arafat by name.
“The latest events are likely to present a historic turning point in the Middle East,” he said.
But Sharon added his standard qualification that any Palestinian leadership was expected to “fight terror” before it could expect Israel to agree to negotiations.
Similarly, the United States president, George Bush, did not offer condolences on Arafat’s death, instead describing it as “a significant moment in Palestinians’ history”.
But the Israeli opposition leader, Shimon Peres, who shared a Nobel peace prize with Arafat and the assassinated Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, was more forgiving.
“Arafat is dead, so should be our aggravation about him. Let bygones be bygones and openings be openings. Let’s turn our face to the opening.”
The transition of power on Thursday was smooth after days of preparation.
Within hours of Arafat’s passing, the speaker of Parliament, Ruhi Fatouh, was sworn in as acting president of the Palestinian Authority until elections, which are supposed to be held within 60 days.
The former prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, was confirmed as leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation that dominates Parliament, making him the most influential politician of the moment.
He is expected to work closely with the prime minister, Ahmed Qureia. The two have sought to minimise any possibility of conflict during the transition of power. After a brief military ceremony with a brass band at a military airport outside Paris, Arafat’s coffin, draped in the Palestinian flag, was loaded on to the plane for Cairo.
A tearful Suha Arafat, his wife, also boarded the aircraft. Around four hours later the aircraft arrived in Egypt, where the coffin was moved to a military hospital ahead of Friday’s funeral.
Among those scheduled to attend the ceremony at Cairo airport are King Hussein of Jordan, and the presidents of Egypt, Lebanon, Tunisia, Indonesia and South Africa. The Pakistani and Swedish prime ministers are attending.
Most European countries will be represented by their foreign ministers, including Jack Straw.
Washington is sending a low-level diplomat, William Burns, an assistant secretary of state, reflecting the US shunning of Arafat as a “failed leader” complicit in terrorism.
Traffic in the Egyptian capital was to be redirected and the public kept away from the funeral. – Guardian Unlimited Â