  We prove that hyperbolic groups are weakly amenable. This partially extends
the result of Cowling and Haagerup showing that lattices in simple Lie groups
of real rank one are weakly amenable. We take a combinatorial approach in the
spirit of Haagerup and prove that for the word length metric d on a hyperbolic
group, the Schur multipliers associated with r^d have uniformly bounded norms
for 0<r<1. We then combine this with a Bozejko-Picardello type inequality to
obtain weak amenability.
