Some ten-thousand Palestinians accorded an emotional farewell on Wednesday to Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, known as "the poet of the resistance" for his defiant verses against Israeli occupation.
His coffin, draped in a Palestinian flag, was driven from Palestinian presidential headquarters to a hilltop grave next to the Ramallah Cultural Palace, now renamed the Mahmoud Darwish cultural palace.
Mr Darwish died on Saturday night in Houston, Texas, at age 67 from complications after heart surgery.
The poetry of Mr Darwish, whose boyhood village of Berwa in what is now northern Israel was destroyed in 1948, emphasised displacement, exile and homelessness. After moving to the Soviet Union in 1971, Mr Darwish lived in Cairo, Beirut, Tunis and Paris before settling in Ramallah in the 1990s. "He gave voice to our problem, our issue, our pain," said Julinar Abu Akel, 22, a business student at the Wizo college in Haifa, who was one of many Israeli Arabs to attend the funeral. As an example she recited a Darwish poem, Stranger in a Far Away City.
"When I was young and beautiful/the rose was my home/and the springs were my sea/the rose became doubly wounded/and the springs turned into sweat/have you changed a great deal?/I haven't changed a lot."
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