The Palestinians remember Arafat in their most difficult stages

The Palestinians commemorated the twenty-second anniversary of the passing of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat by calling for national unity, recalling the biography of the man who during his life and after his departure became a symbol of identity and national unity, in the midst of a complex and difficult phase in which Arafat’s legacy and the Palestinian issue face unprecedented existential risks.

Palestinian Vice President Hussein Al-Sheikh said, at a central festival held at the Palestinian presidential headquarters in Ramallah, on Wednesday, that the Palestinian leadership is continuing in Arafat’s footsteps, adhering to national constants and the right of the Palestinian people to freedom and independence, and to national unity, which “constitutes the basic tool for confronting conspiracies that target the Palestinian cause and existence.”

In the speech he delivered on behalf of the President of the Palestinian National Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, Al-Sheikh called for “strengthening national unity within the framework of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people,” calling on “all forces and factions to join under its framework, as it is the political address and unifying home of the Palestinians.”

Al-Sheikh added that the Fatah movement and the Executive Committee of the Liberation Organization took a decision that paves the way for the launch of a national dialogue, and the procedures related to the formation of the new Palestinian National Council were halted, to make room for national consensus on rebuilding the organization’s institutions.

The Sheikh's speech came after he, accompanied by members of the Executive Committees of the Liberation Organization and the Central Committee of the Fatah Movement, and officials and leaders of security services, visited Arafat's shrine in Ramallah. The sheikh said he hopes to eventually move the shrine to Jerusalem, the capital of the Palestinian state.

In the Gaza Strip, which was destroyed by the Israeli war on the Strip, a festival was organized to commemorate Arafat at Al-Azhar University, in which pictures of Arafat, Palestinian flags, and flags of the Fatah movement were raised, but on a smaller scale than in the West Bank.

The case of the arrest of five Hezbollah members in the barren region intersecting between the Bcharre and Batroun districts in northern Lebanon on Tuesday interacts, so that investigations focus on the reasons for the tours that the elements were carrying out in remote, non-residential barren areas, and the goals they were seeking.

Judicial sources told Asharq Al-Awsat that the investigation into the five members who were arrested is still within the framework of gathering information, and is expanding, and focusing on the reasons for their movement in the region. Prime Minister Nawaf Salam stressed that “the time of absence of accountability and confusion has ended,” stressing that “the investigations that have begun will have no ceiling other than the ceiling of the law.”

In Gaza, field estimates indicate that Hamas’s control has become fragile and does not exceed 17 to 20 percent of the area of ​​the Strip, in light of the expansion of Israeli control across the so-called “yellow line” and the operations of Israeli-backed armed gangs.