BETHLEHEM, Jan 26: Several thousand Palestinians took to the streets of Bethlehem on Saturday to affirm their solidarity with their leader Yasser Arafat.

The crowd gathered peacefully at mid-day and marched to the offices in this West Bank city where Arafat has been confined and kept under virtual house arrest by the Israeli army since early December, an AFP correspondent reported. Representatives of the main Palestinian factions attended the march, as well as lawmakers and local Muslim and Christian leaders.

The National and Islamic Forces, a coalition of 13 Islamic and secular groups formed at the start of the 16-month Palestinian intifada, or uprising, against Israeli occupation distributed a statement to the crowd.

It called for “the continuation of the intifada, the necessity to affirm national unity and to release political prisoners,” who have been jailed by the Palestinian Authority mostly in the last three months.

“This demonstration is to stress our opposition to Israel’s actions against President Arafat, to Israeli reprisals against the Palestinian people and to assert the popular character of the intifada,” Issa Qaraqa, a lawmaker representing Arafat’s Fatah movement in Bethlehem, told the crowd. The demonstration was called by Fatah, and militant groups such as Hamas and the Islamic Jihad and other factions later agreed to join in.—AFP