Yasser Arafat. Photo: wiki commons.

Al-Jazeera reported this week that a Swiss lab hired to examine the clothes of Yasser Arafat found high levels of radioactive polonium. According to Al-Jazeera, while the findings are not conclusive, it could indicate that Arafat may have been poisoned.

Yasser Arafat died in November 2004 in a hospital in Paris after being treated for an unnamed illness. The French hospital never publicly disclosed the cause of death and the Palestinian Authority never released the medical records it received from the hospital.

In 2007, Ahmad Jibril, head of the PFLP-GC (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command) told Al-Manar TV (Hezbollah) that at a meeting with PA Chairman Abbas, he was told by one of the delegation that the French medical report concluded that Arafat died of AIDS:

This statement was never reported to the Palestinian public.

According to the new Al-Jazeera report, the doctors who treated Arafat when he was sick, still today refuse to release any information, some saying the information related to his death is a “military secret”:

While refusing to allow access to the medical report that would describe his illness, senior PA sources consistently have blamed Israel for poisoning Arafat.

At a PLO cultural celebration in the presence of the PA Minister of Culture, a child on stage performed a skit comparing Arafat’s death to the death of Jesus by the Jews.

The Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Yasser Arafat Institute, Nasser Al-Qidwa, said last year:

To give credence to the poisoning story, the PA has reported on an international intrigue in which Israel initiated the murder plan, the US approved it with certain conditions, and the French doctors who treated Arafat concealed the truth in order to salvage the peace process.