Palestinians want to know who killed Arafat
Palestinians are not surprised by the findings of the Swiss forensic report that the late PLO leader Yasser Arafat's body contained high levels of polonium.
Few Palestinians were surprised when a Swiss lab showed that the remains of late Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat contained a high quantity of polonium. No protests are expected and nothing seems different outside the Palestinian headquarters in Ramallah.
Arafat spent his last days at those headquarters in Palestine before being taken, dressed in pajamas, by a Jordanian army helicopter to Amman in October 2004, then flown to a military hospital outside Paris, only to return in a coffin and be bid farewell for the last time by tens of thousands of grieving Palestinians.
The reason few Palestinians were moved by the widely publicized news about Arafat’s probable cause of death is simple: Most Palestinians had already reached the conclusion that their leader, who had been holed up in his headquarters and surrounded by Israeli tanks, did not die a natural death. Arafat’s family, including his nephew Nasser al-Qudwa, who was the PLO’s representative to the UN, and senior PLO officials, including the usually reserved Nabil Shaath, have repeatedly insisted in public that the founder of modern-day Palestinian nationalism had been assassinated by poisoning of some kind.
What Palestinians and the world want to know is not whether Arafat was killed, but who caused his sudden and mysterious death and how. Experts in the Swiss lab, whose detailed 108-page report was outlined on Al Jazeera, state that death by polonium requires the killer element be taken into the body. In other words, someone had to have placed it in Arafat’s food or injected it into his body. This means that the circle of individuals who are potential targets of any investigation can only be those officials who were with or met with Arafat in his last days in Ramallah.
