Yassir Arafat died today in a military hospital in the suburbs of Paris, far from his beloved Palestine and from the people whose struggle he had both led and embodied for four decades.

His death at the age of 75 was announced in France and at his compound in the West Bank city of Ramallah - where the message was that even if Arafat the man had died, Arafat as symbol of Palestinian statehood would live on.

"Arafat is all the nation, and all the nation does not die," said posters plastered overnight on the walls of the Muqata compound, where he spent three years under virtual house arrested before being airlifted to Paris last week.

This afternoon, Mr Arafat's coffin, draped in the Palestinian flag and accompanied by his tearful widow, Suha, was taken to a military airport south of Paris where it was given a solemn send-off fit for a head of state rather than the head of a stateless nation.

The coffin then left on a French air force Airbus bound for Cairo, where Mr Arafat was born, for tomorrow's official funeral. After that, it will be taken by helicopter to Ramallah, where Mr Arafat will be buried.

As news of his death emerged, Palestinians poured onto the streets in Ramallah and Gaza and in camps in Lebanon that still house hundreds of thousands of refugees. Some fired pistols into the air or made makeshift shrines; others just wandered around in dazed grief after the death of the only leader they had ever known.

"I never knew a father, I knew Abu Ammar," said Johaina Okasaha, a refugee at the Ain el-Hilweh camp, using Mr Arafat's nom de guerre. "He was the one we counted on, and now he is gone."

Mourning spilled over into violence in Gaza city, as militants from his Fatah movement attacked a Jewish settlement in what they said signalled the start of a new round of clashes with Israel. Israeli soldiers killed three Palestinians in Gaza and shot dead another Palestinian in stone-throwing confrontations in the West Bank.

What exactly the former guerrilla chief died from is far from clear. Doctors at the Percy military hospital at Clamart in the southwestern suburbs of Paris refused to give any details, citing the family's right to privacy.

Mr Arafat was taken to the hospital last week after doctors in Ramallah were unable to diagnose or clear up a mystery blood disorder. He slipped into a coma last Wednesday and eventually succumbed today at 3.30am French time (2.30am GMT).

Among the visitors to the Percy hospital today was President Chirac, who paid tribute to the guerrilla icon who went on to share the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize with Israel's Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin. "I came to bow before President Yasser Arafat and pay him a final homage," M. Chirac said.

In Ramallah, Palestinian political leaders moved quickly to ensure a smooth succession for the three posts that he occupied - president of the Palestinian authority, head of the Palestine Liberation Movement and head of the ruling Fatah movement. Mr Arafat himself had never appointed a successor, preferring to remain the undisputed leader of the Palestinian people.

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