Automatic text summarization is a field situated at the intersection of natural language processing and information retrieval. Its main objective is to automatically produce a condensed representative form of documents. This paper presents ArA*summarizer, an automatic system for Arabic single document summarization. The system is based on an unsupervised hybrid approach that combines statistical, cluster‐based, and graph‐based techniques. The main idea is to divide text into subtopics then select the most relevant sentences in the most relevant subtopics. The selection process is done by an A* algorithm executed on a graph representing the different lexical–semantic relationships between sentences. Experimentation is conducted on Essex Arabic summaries corpus and using recall‐oriented understudy for gisting evaluation, automatic summarization engineering, merged model graphs, and n‐gram graph powered evaluation via regression evaluation metrics. The evaluation results showed the good performance of our system compared with existing works.