(Adds background, presidential source) By Mohammed Assadi and Ali Sawafta RAMALLAH, West Bank, Aug 9 (Reuters) - Mahmoud Darwish, whose poetry his fellow Palestinians embraced as the voice of their suffering, died on Saturday after heart surgery in Texas. A hospital spokeswoman in Houston said the 67-year-old poet died after an operation but did not give a cause of death. The office of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas earlier released a statement saying that "the great poet" was in a very critical condition. His culture minister said Darwish had been on life support following a heart operation two days earlier. A source in Abbas's administration said the president had been told of Darwish's death and would issue a statement. The death of a man whose life and words were tightly bound up in a struggle for a Palestinian national rebirth that seems little closer than when his first work was published in 1960 was certain to trigger an outpouring of popular emotion. Widely seen as the Palestinian "national poet", Darwish's writing was much translated. He won new generations of admirers with work that evoked not just the pain of Palestinians displaced, as he was as a child, by the foundation of Israel 60 years ago, but also subtle paradoxes and broader human themes. He enjoyed a following across the Arab world, where he had the kind of readership contemporary poets in English and other European languages, eclipsed by novelists, can only dream of. "His death is a loss to the Palestinian people, to the Palestinian cause and to freedom-loving people around the world," said Ahmad Ibrahim, a banker in Ramallah. Just last month he packed out a hall for a reading in that West Bank city where he had made his home, and millions watched on television an event that commemorated the 60th anniversary of the "Nakba", or catastrophe, of Israel's creation in 1948. He was among that half of the Arab population of Palestine driven from their homes, in his family's case near the port of Haifa. They later returned to live in the area. EXILE Jailed several times and stripped of an Israeli passport, Darwish left in 1971 to study in the Soviet Union. Exile in Cairo, Beirut and Paris followed. Darwish also served on the executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organisation. But he broke with PLO leader Yasser Arafat and resigned his post in protest at the 1993 Oslo accords with Israel by which the Palestinians agreed to establish a state alongside Israel. Fifteen years on, revived negotiations appear to most observers to be going nowhere. Further violence, a bitter split between Abbas in the West Bank and his Islamist rivals in the Gaza Strip and continued Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank leaves few Palestinians hopeful of securing a state. Last month, Darwish told Reuters his latest writing was imbued with a sarcastic humour and a sense of both Israelis and Palestinians, however antagonistic, sharing an uncertain future. "Sarcasm helps me overcome the harshness of the reality we live, eases the pain of scars and makes people smile," he said. "The sarcasm is not only related to today's reality but also to history. History laughs at both the victim and the aggressor." In a new poem called "The Written Script", Darwish relates a dialogue between a victim and his enemy who fall into a pit together and are waiting for someone to throw them a lifeline. He sees Israelis bent on suicide, taking Palestinians with them, if the occupation of the West Bank goes on: "A killer and his victim die together in one hole," he says in the piece. A lifelong smoker, Darwish had suffered previous serious ill health, twice undergoing heart surgery in the past. In a recent poem "The Dice Thrower", Darwish told the story of his life and said death was coming yet he clung to life: "To Life I say: Go slow, wait for me until the drunkenness dries in my glass/ I have no role in what I was or who I will be/ It is chance and chance has no name/ I call the doctor 10 minutes before the death, 10 minutes are sufficient to live by chance." (Additional reporting by Wafa Amr, Joseph Nasr and Houston bureau; Writing by Alastair Macdonald; editing by Sami Aboudi)
Jewish settler boys walk on a street in the West Bank city of Hebron August 6, 2008. In 2007, Israel's B'Tselem human rights group said more than 1,000 Palestinian homes had ...
