SEVERAL thousand mourners, including Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, attended the funeral in Ramallah today of cabinet minister Ziad Abu Ain.

Mr Abbas said that Mr Abu Ain had been the victim of a “barbaric act.” He decreed three days of mourning.

Anticipating protests over the leading Fatah member’s death at the hands of the occupation forces, the Israeli military sent troop reinforcements to the West Bank. Dozens of young stone-throwers clashed with Israeli troops in the West Bank city of Hebron.

Palestinian doctors said that Mr Abu Ain had died from a blow, not natural causes. Israeli doctors said that his death had arisen from a blockage of the coronary artery due to arterial bleeding caused possibly by stress.

TV showed a brutal military response to the Palestinians’ peaceful protest on Wednesday when they attempted to plant olive saplings on land that an illegal zionist settlement has in its sights for expansion.

An elderly man was thrown to the ground by the occupation forces while Mr Abu Ain was grabbed by the throat, headbutted in the face and hit in the chest with a rifle stock.

Palestinian pathologist Saber Aloul said that some of Mr Abu Ain’s teeth had been knocked out and dropped to the back of his mouth and that regurgitated food had entered his airway.

Health Minister Jawad Awad said that “the results of the autopsy show that the ones who killed the martyr Ziad Abu Ain are the Israeli occupying forces.”

Mr Abu Ain had spent several years in Israeli prisons and, after being given a life sentence in 1979 for resistance activities, he was released in a 1985 prisoner swap.

During the second intifada in 2002, he spent a year in administrative detention without trial or charges.