AFP
 The Israeli ambassador has criticised the French government for issuing a death certificate for Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat stating his place of birth as Jerusalem. "I cannot understand how the French government agreed to issue a death certificate based on false information," ambassador Nissim Zvili told a press conference in Montpellier. Municipal officials at Clamart, the suburb of Paris where Arafat died on November 11, said they issued the document on the basis of a family record book itself issued by the French foreign ministry in 1996. The issue is symbolically important because Israel considers Jerusalem as its eternal capital, while Palestinians want to make east Jerusalem, occupied by the Jewish state since 1967, the capital of their promised state. Arafat was born Mohammed Abdel-Rawf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Hussaini, on August 4, 1929. The official version of his life history records he was born in Jerusalem. However numerous biographers agree that he was, in fact, born in Cairo, where his father, from Gaza, owned a business. And it was Egypt that hosted Arafat's funeral with full military honours. |