Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat has died in a French hospital after slipping into a deep coma.
Palestinian officials agreed to an offer from Egypt to host a state funeral. Consultations between the Egyptian government and Palestinians took place in the past days and it was agreed to hold the funeral in Cairo to make it easy for Arab leaders to attend, the sources said.
Arafat will reportedly be buried at the location of his Ramallah compound. Originally, Arafat had wished to be buried in the Temple Mount.
Earlier in the week, French doctors announced Arafat's condition had worsened overnight and had slipped deeper into a coma.
Prior to his demise, Arafat's wife - Suha - accused the Palestinian leadership of trying to "bury [Arafat] alive."
Palestinian Speaker of the Parliment Rawhi Fattuh is set to stand in as interim leader for 60-days until a new leader can be appointed.
Arafat was born Mohammed Abdel-Raouf Qudwa al-Hussaeini on August 24, 1929 in Cairo, Egypt.
When he was five years old, he was sent to live with his maternal uncle in Jerusalem, the capital of Palestine, then under British rule.
In 1958, Arafat and his friends founded Al-Fatah, an underground network of secret cells, which in 1959 began to publish a magazine advocating armed struggle against Israel. At the end of 1964, Arafat left Kuwait to become a full-time revolutionary, organizing raids into Israel from Jordan.
On January 20, 1996, Arafat was elected President of the Palestinian National Authority with 83 percent of the vote.
Arafat also shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres in 1994.
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