The Death of Yasser Arafat

Yasser Arafat fell ill on 12 October 2004 inside the Muqata’a, the Ramallah compound where Israeli forces had confined him for more than two years. After two weeks of worsening nausea, vomiting, and abdominal pain that his doctors could not diagnose, he was flown to France on 29 October. At the Percy military hospital near Paris he deteriorated rapidly, fell into a coma on 3 November, and died on 11 November 2004, aged 75. French doctors recorded a massive hemorrhagic stroke but declared the underlying condition unknown.

What killed him has been contested ever since. In 2012 an Al Jazeera investigation found traces of polonium on his belongings in quantities suggesting poisoning, and his body was exhumed. The investigations that followed split: the Swiss forensic team wrote that “we cannot exclude 210Po as a cause of death, but we cannot be sure”; French and Russian examinations concluded polonium did not cause his death; a French court found in 2015 that poisoning was not demonstrated. Many Palestinians have never accepted a natural death, and no account has closed the question.

His funeral drew massive crowds, and he was buried in a stone sarcophagus at the Muqata’a — with the stated intention that he be reinterred in Jerusalem when Palestinian statehood is achieved. With him ended four decades in which one man had personified the national movement: from Fatah’s founding circle in Kuwait to Karameh, from the UN rostrum in 1974 to the Algiers declaration, the Oslo handshake, and the second intifada’s ruins. Two months later Mahmoud Abbas was elected to succeed him — inheriting the institutions Arafat built and the impasse he left.