A report from Ramallah said the Palestinian
President Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinians
were on Tuesday marking the 10th anniversary
of the death of Yasser Arafat.
Arafat, for decades, led the course of the
Palestinians for an independent state.
He said the 75 year old Arafat, was being
remembered at a wreath laying ceremony at his
tomb in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
He said that a large rally scheduled for Gaza
was cancelled following a series of explosions
on Friday targeting the site of the event, and
the property and cars of officials of Abbas'
Fatah party, which was founded by Arafat.
Arafat became the head of the Palestine
Liberation Organisation (PLO), an umbrella
group in which Fatah is the leading faction, in
1969.
Initially operating against Israel from exile in
Arab countries, he returned to the West Bank
following the 1993 interim Oslo peace accords.
But violence and stalemate derailed the peace
process and Arafat spent the last phase of his
life under siege at his Ramallah headquarters,
with Israeli tanks outside.
Israel had declared him an "obstacle to peace"
because of his dual support for armed attacks
and peace negotiations.
Arafat was later transferred to a hospital near
Paris, where he died on Nov. 11, 2004 of a
brain hemorrhage caused by complications
from a bowel infection.
In November 2013, a Swiss study of exhumed
samples of Arafat's remains found high levels
of polonium, which "moderately" supported a
hypothesis that he could have been poisoned
with the radioactive material, an allegation put
forward by his widow Suha.
But separate French and Russian studies
concluded he died of natural causes.
The Swiss study also acknowledged that the
polonium could have been naturally occurring in
air pockets or soil around Arafat's decomposing
remains.
Nonetheless a theory that Arafat was poisoned
by Israel was still believed by many
Palestinians.
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