Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat is "brain dead," a French medical source said Thursday after a French spokesman announced he was not dead. 

Arafat is prolonged in "very deep coma of stage IV" thanks to life support machines and such artificial care can be "extended for several days or several weeks thanks to the machines," French RFI television quoted the source as saying.

On Thursday evening, despite the chill, a hundred of journalists and Arafat's supporters crowded outside the Percy Military Hospital, south of Paris, where Arafat is being treated. Many candles were lightened under the Palestinian leader's portraits hung on a large Palestinian flag.

His supporters, mainly Arabs coming not only from Palestine, but also Pakistan, Tunisia, Algeria, among other Arabic countries, were holding Palestinian flags and Arafat's portraits, praying for his recovery. Some of them said they wanted to spend all the night there.

Earlier in the day top medical official for the French defense forces General Christian Estripeau denied the reports, mainly from Israel, saying Arafat was dead.

"Mr. Arafat is not dead," he declared in a brief statement outside the Percy military hospital at the southwest Paris suburb of Clamart, where Arafat has been hospitalized since last Friday.

"The patient's condition needs appropriate treatment that required his being transferred to a unit suited to his pathology on the afternoon of Wednesday November 3," he said, admitting "his clinical situation has become more complex."

French President Jacques Chirac on Thursday afternoon paid a short visit to Arafat before his departure for a European Union meeting in Brussels.

Some contradicted sources aired in the daytime over Arafat's health condition. Some says he had lost consciousness three times over the last 24 hours and had been in a coma for several hours, while others denied he was in a coma, according to French RFI news television.

The issue where Arafat was likely to be laid after his passing away is set to be controversial between Israel and Palestine.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had made it clear that he will not let Yasser Arafat be in Jerusalem even in death.

"As long as I am prime minister, Arafat will not be buried in Jerusalem," Sharon told the weekly cabinet session.

Arafat, symbol of the Palestinian cause for four decades, had said earlier that he desired to be buried in the Temple Mount in East Jerusalem, a city Palestinians claimed to be the capital of its future state.

Wakf, an organization overseeing the holy Muslim sites on the Temple Mount, rejected Israel's right to decide Arafat's final resting place.

"Nobody will tell us where to bury him and the final decision lies in the hands of the Palestinian people," Wakf director Adnan Husseini said.

(Xinhua News Agency November 5, 2004)