Yasser Arafat underwent medical tests on Saturday and a senior Palestinian official said doctors had ruled out for the time being that the PLO leader was suffering from leukaemia.
"The doctors exclude for the time being any possibility of leukaemia," the Palestinian envoy to Paris, Leila Shahid, told reporters. "There are other possibilities."
Arafat's "general condition is better," she added.
Palestinian officials said the first of a battery of tests for cancers and other disorders showed no immediate risk of the 75-year-old dying. They said a full analysis could take until as late as Wednesday.
Arafat arrived in a French military hospital in the Paris suburb of Clamart on Friday, after flying in from his shell-battered compound in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
The Palestinian president, effectively confined to his offices by Israeli forces for the past 2-1/2 years, agreed to fly to France only after Israel promised to allow him to return to the West Bank following treatment.
Arafat went into the French hospital with an abnormally low count of blood platelets - a condition that can be caused by leukaemia - but the number of platelets had since doubled, a Palestinian official said.
The French army health department issued a statement saying a bill of health would be made public as soon as it was complete - without giving a date - and that visitors beyond his family and his closest aides were being refused for Arafat's comfort.
Palestinian officials said requests for visits by EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana and Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos, who knows Arafat well after a stint as an EU peace envoy, had been turned down.
AILING ARAFAT IS STILL IN CHARGE: PLO
Leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organisation affirmed on Saturday in Ramallah that Yasser Arafat remained very much in charge despite his absence for urgent medical treatment in France.
The PLO's executive committee met for the first time in decades without the 75-year-old Arafat, at his battered headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah a day after his departure.
"We are in touch with the president and still receiving his instructions as he is head of the Palestine Liberation Organisation," acting chairman and former Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas said after the session adjourned.
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