BEIRUT, March 24 (News Agencies) - Demonstrators have taken to the streets across the Arab world to demand support for the intifada by Arab leaders in the Arab Summit to be held in Beirut starting Wednesday, March 27.

The head of the Lebanese Resistance Movement Hezbollah, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah called Sunday, March 24, on Arab leaders meeting here this week to give arms to the Palestinians instead of discussing normalisation with Israel, news agencies reported.

"The Arab summit should back in a clear manner the intifada and the resistance of the Palestinian people ... by providing them with arms and money," Nasrallah told a massive crowd of 200,000 gathered at a main square at Beirut's southern suburbs, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).

Nasrallah was speaking to mark 'Ashura, an Islamic festival. "The minimum required is to prevent the Americans, who are exerting growing pressures, to suffocate the intifada or plot against it," he said.

"Any resolution that does not back the intifada of the Palestinian people will be an American resolution written by Arabic hands," he added.

Nasrallah accused the United States of attempting to impose a truce between the Palestinians and the Israelis "in order to be able to pursue the second phase of its so-called war against terrorism, and to attack Iraq."

"If you do not want to back the intifada, at least don't prevent it from acting against the Israeli war machine," he said, before appealing "to the honor of the Arabs."

"We call for our right to resist and we refuse that the Americans consider it terrorism. The martyrs who are blowing themselves up in Palestine, are not only martyrs, they are heros," he said.

He reminded Arab leaders that they were meeting this week in Lebanon, "a country that has defeated the Isareli army and that has forced it to withdraw without conditions from southern Lebanon" in May 2000.

"To those who want to only regain territories occupied by Israel in 1967, we tell them that all of Palestine, from the (Jordan) river to the (Mediterranean) sea, belongs to the Palestinian people," he said.

Responding to the Saudi crown prince peace initiative, the Hezbollah chief said "the Arab peoples are opposed to any normalization" with Israel and are "attached to the (Palestinian refugees) right to return."

Meanwhile, more than 400 people staged a demonstration in Shebaa Sunday, March 24, to call on Arab leaders to push for an Israeli pullout from the disputed border Shebaa Farms area at next week's summit in Beirut.

The protestors marched from the village of Shebaa to the Burkat al-Naqqar gate at the edge of the Shebaa Farms, a mountainous territory at the Lebanese-Syrian borders occupied by Israel since 1967.

Yehya Ali, a representative of a local committee, made an appeal to Arab leaders meeting for an annual two-day summit in Beirut starting on Wednesday. "We call for the setting up an Arab committee, headed by Arab League Secretary General Amr Mussa, to exert pressure on powerful countries" to help ensure an Israeli pullout from Shebaa Farms, he said. The residents also wanted compensation, he said.

Israel continues to occupy the Shebaa Farms, seized from Syria in the 1967 Middle East war and claimed by Beirut with southern Lebanon after 22 years of occupation in May 2000.

In Syria, tens of thousands of Syrians waving Palestinian flags and banners gathered Sunday to show support for the uprising against Israel in the occupied territories.

Students, office workers and Palestinians from the Yarmuk camp south of here flocked to Omeyyades place and seven surrounding streets in the western part of the city to voice their backing for the intifada.

Carrying flags and banners hailing the "gallant" intifada, the crowd denounced what it called the "terrorist policies" of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

The protest, organized by the Popular Committee for the Support of the Intifada, called on the Arab summit opening Wednesday in Beirut to support the Palestinians and press for an end to U.N. sanctions on Iraq dating from the Gulf War.

In Oman, Sayed Fahd bin Mahmud Al Said, the deputy prime minister for cabinet affairs said that Arab heads of state meeting in Beirut this week must achieve a modicum of solidarity in order to help the Palestinians in their conflict with Israel.

The two-day Arab summit opening Wednesday must achieve "a minimum level of solidarity ... and agreement so that the Palestinian people get a chance to live in peace on their land and within the secure borders of their state," said Al-Said.

"This is indispensable at this stage, marked by Israel's obstinacy and its practices which endanger the security and stability of the entire region," he said, quoted by the official Oman News Agency (ONA) news agency.

The Saudi Middle East peace initiative shows that "the Arab people are peace-lovers and that (peace) is their strategic option provided it is based on justice," Said said.

The Arab summit should "establish a practical mechanism for implementation" of the Saudi land-for-peace offer, he added.

The Arabs "must know what they want and speak to the world with one voice" if the current cycle of violence between Palestinians and Israelis is to be broken, the Omani official said. "The Palestinian people cannot take more suffering and are more than ever in need of stability in order to build their state on their national soil," he added.

Oman announced in October 2000 it was shutting Israel's trade office in Muscat and its own commercial representation in Tel Aviv, opened four years earlier amid hopes that the Middle East peace process would bear fruit.