Hungry, cold and besieged, Arafat defies Israel in the ruins of his empire

Saturday was a dinner of boiled potatoes by candlelight for Yasser Arafat, a long night of waiting for the Israeli tanks grinding their gears outside his office to rev up for the final assault, and for the Palestinian leader to embrace the martyrdom he says he craves.
Yesterday afternoon brought a brief, but surreal, reprieve when anti-globalisation and peace activists waved white flags, and marched past bewildered Israeli soldiers into the squat two-storey building that marks the last redoubt of Mr Arafat's vanished domain.

It was a full-blown melodrama, but inside the two floors that remain under Mr Arafat's charge, conditions remained grim and his situation highly volatile, with sporadic gunfire punctuating a cold, grey day.

Though workers managed to restore some electricity lines yesterday, during the half-hour time-out in Mr Arafat's quarantine, the lights died down four times. There was no water for toilets or bathing because the Israeli soldiers have shot out the compound's water tanks.

Phone lines have been cut; mobile phone signals are jammed. Though three ambulances brought in parcels of food from the Red Cross on Saturday, rations are meagre: pitta bread, triangles of processed cheese, milk and cucumbers. "Inside, they were telling us, there are shortages of food and water," said Fayzeh Salamah, a Palestinian hospital worker, who visited the compound. "It looks a mess."