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RAMALLAH, Nov 10: Former prime minister Mahmoud Abbas has emerged as the favourite to succeed Yasser Arafat as chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, the Palestinians' highest decision-making body.
As Mr Arafat lay in a Paris hospital with a brain haemorrhage, the Palestinian leadership agreed to implement a transition plan mandated by Palestinian law after a meeting in the West Bank city of Ramallah on Wednesday.
Some Palestinian officials publicly insisted Mr Arafat was still alive but aides said privately that he was dead.
Wednesday's move effectively allows Palestinians to carry out an interim succession once Mr Arafat's death is announced.
The succession plan called for Palestinian parliament chairman Rawhi Fattouh to be sworn in as interim president of the Palestinian Authority on the day Mr Arafat was declared dead.
But the reform-minded Abbas, who has criticized violence in a four-year-old Palestinian uprising, holds the second-highest position in the PLO as secretary-general and would become acting chairman on Mr Arafat's death.
The PLO leadership was expected to choose a permanent chairman within two months of Arafat's death, with Abbas seen as the likeliest choice. Presidential elections would be called within 60 days as well.
"The general feeling among the PLO members is to have Abu Mazen as the head of the PLO," PLO executive committee member Taysir Khaled said, using Abbas's nom de guerre.
As PLO chief, Abbas would preside over an executive committee of about a dozen members who decide issues of war and peace with Israel and have effective jurisdiction over the Palestinian Authority.
Palestinian officials and political analysts hope a partnership between Abbas, Fattouh and Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qurie would create a more transparent political model that could tackle reforms in the Authority.
"Maybe what the Palestinians need now is less of an icon and more of a structure for a government," Edward Abington, an adviser to the Palestinian Authority in the United States and a former U.S. Consul in Jerusalem, said.
BRITISH FORT: Yasser Arafat's ravaged leadership compound, which is poised to become the Palestinian leader's final resting place, is a one-time British fort later used as an Israeli military camp.
Before his dramatic airlift to a French military hospital late last month, Mr Arafat had been kept a virtual prisoner by Israeli forces in the sprawling headquarters, widely known as the Muqataa, for nearly three years.
The Ramallah compound was built by the British as a military headquarters, court and prison, during their 1923-1948 mandate of Palestine.
Covering an area of around three dunams (3,000 square metres), the site was later used as a base by Jordan during its administration of the West Bank.
After seizing the West Bank in the 1967 war, the Israeli army took over the compound until the Palestinian Authority was established in 1994.
Mr Arafat lived in the original building until 1996, when a new block was added to the compound and it swiftly turned into his West Bank headquarters.
Tanks were soon also parked outside the Muqataa and punched their way inside the compound on March 29, 2002, kicking off a five-week siege, trapping Arafat in his offices without electricity or water.
On June 10, 2002, tanks poured back into the West Bank city and surrounded the Muqataa as bulldozers dug into the already battered compound for another two days.-Reuters/AFP
