Who could follow Arafat?
Yasser Arafat has been careful during his long career not to anoint a successor.
Like many other Arab leaders, he has been wary of rivals - and even his closest lieutenants have often been kept on a short leash.
The death of senior Palestinian official Faisal Husseini in June 2001 strengthened the impression that the old guard of Palestinian leaders are gradually fading from the scene.
And since Mr Arafat is now a frail figure in his mid 70s, speculation about who will one day take his place is inevitable.
The contenders
Possible contenders fall into two main categories. There are the older men who have worked with Mr Arafat for a long time and younger figures who have come to the fore more recently.
Those in the first category worked with the PLO - the umbrella body of the Palestinian movement - during its long years in exile in Jordan, Lebanon and Tunisia.
They are people Mr Arafat trusts, but Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza tend to regard them as outsiders. They are sometimes dubbed the "Tunisians" and some of them are tainted by accusations of corruption.
In the second category are "insiders", younger men who remained in the Israeli-occupied territories when the PLO was in exile.
They have stronger roots than the "Tunisians", and they acquired their first taste of local leadership during the first intifada, or uprising against Israeli rule, which broke out in the late 1980s.
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