MIDDLE EAST: The death watch at the battered presidential compound of Yasser Arafat continued throughout yesterday, with hundreds of journalists, television teams and photographers vying for space past the sliding iron gate decorated with a poster of the Old Man.
The Yasser Arafat pictured was, indeed, an old man, with watery eyes and pendulous lower lip, his head covered in trademark black and white checked kuffiyeh scarf. Armed policemen in red berets barred our way into the compound and made us part for cars sweeping through the entrance.
The police had slung cars across the top and bottom of the sloping road which runs along the rough cement wall of the compound, called the muqata in Arabic.
Press vehicles were parked every which way in the empty lot across from the muqata, cameramen had taken up position under umbrellas atop houses, and young men were hammering together three makeshift board platforms for other television teams.
Television networks reporters and camera teams peered down on us from rented rooms in an unfinished five-storey building at the top of the road.
We stood along the dusty verges of the road, chatting with colleagues last seen at a Baghdad press conference or on a Bethlehem rooftop overlooking the Church of the Nativity where, in April-May 2002, Palestinian gunmen were besieged for 40 days by the Israeli army.
The Palestinian team returned early in the morning from Paris where they had consulted with Mr Arafat's doctors, the French authorities, and the Prime Minister, Mr Ahmad Korei, who had visited him in the intensive care unit of the hospital. In the muqata, Mr Mahmud Abbas, the acting chairman of the executive committees of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) and ruling Fateh movement held lengthy meetings with senior figures in these bodies. Mr Korei met officials and cabinet members at his office.
Personalities came and went in cars with darkened windows. Although we were promised a press conference at 11, we were not invited into the compound and learnt nothing during our vigil.
At about two o'clock, as the sun bore down, a bulldozer climbed the road and turned into the muqata.
It was followed by lifting equipment and three large lorries. Soon afterwards the growl and screech of the machines reverberated within the walls of the compound.
A television cameraman offered me his stool so I could take a look. While the bulldozer was clearing earth barricades, the flattened and wrecked cars which had also formed part of the defences of the muqata were being loaded onto the lorries.
As Mr Arafat lingered in life, his burial place was being prepared.
Only a handful of Palestinians joined the vigil. A young woman in black with a black and white checked scarf and a broach bearing a picture of Mr Arafat strode up and down the road, too shy to speak to us.
"She's a Fateh member," remarked a friend. Half a dozen young men leaned against the wall near me. They had come to await news from Paris.
"Yasser Arafat is our father and a great leader of the Arabs and the international community," asserted Tewfik Herzallah from the city of Jenin in the northern West Bank.
"I think he was killed by poison. After three or four years we may find out the truth. Remember what happened to Nasser," he said, referring to the Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser who died suddenly in 1970.
He said that most Palestinians believe Mr Arafat was poisoned in spite of a strong denial by the Foreign Minister, Dr Nabil Shaath, on Tuesday night.
Back in my abode I learnt the Palestinian foreign ministry was telling diplomats accredited to the Palestinian Authority that Mr Arafat would die within six to 24 hours, the funeral attended by foreign dignitaries would be at a mosque in Cairo, and the burial would be at the muqata.
