Palestinian authorities earlier today opened Yasser Arafat’s tomb in Palestine and removed remains that will be checked by labs in France, Switzerland and Russia to see if he was poisoned in 2004, as many Palestinians have long suspected.
After a report by Al-Jazeera in July added credence to the rumors that he may have been poisoned by polonium, Arafat’s widow Suha called for an exhumation, which was granted by Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority that governs parts of the West Bank.
The investigation comes at a sensitive time for Palestine and Israel, just days after a ceasefire was called in a conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza that killed 166 Palestinians, including dozens of civilians, and six Israelis during 8 days of fighting. Though many Palestinians already believe that he was poisoned by Israel while he was being confined to his Ramallah compound by Israeli authorities for more than two years during the second Palestinian uprising, it make spark new outrage if the poisoning is confirmed—or if the investigations prove inconclusive. But because of the rivalry between Hamas, which controls Gaza, and the Palestinian Authority, which runs the West Bank, perhaps a report on Arafat won’t spark new tensions in Gaza.
The samples taken Tuesday will be flown to laboratories in the three countries involved, with results expected within several months. But some experts question whether anything conclusive will be found because polonium has a short half-life.
“He should have been left alone,” said Munir Jaara at a coffee shop close to the Muqata mausoleum where his body was exhumed. “We all know the Israelis killed him so what’s it going to prove to disturb his body? It’s disrespectful.”
But Ghada Nayfeh disagreed. “We need to find the truth. It was very suspicious how he died, just like that, under siege from the Israelis,” she said.
According to Jean-Rene Jourdain, deputy head of human protection at the French Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety (IRSN), it would take weeks of analysis to be sure that the traces were man-made polonium rather than just coincidental contamination by naturally-occurring polonium.
“Even if traces of polonium are found, it doesn’t mean that they are man-made,” he told AFP.
The scene outside the Muqata was very different today than when Arafat was buried in 2004. Eight years ago, Palestinians packed the Muqata—the old British administration building that served as his headquarters after his return to the West Bank—and they hung off the rooftops as his coffin wound its way through the chanting, shooting crowds, past the rubble left by the Israeli siege, to a hastily dug grave site.
Nut now the Muqata is rebuilt and transformed into a sprawling presidential palace of Jerusalem stone. Arafat’s mausoleum is now a towering quadrangle of limestone and glass, a reflecting pool, and an honor guard. Today the elaborate structure was hidden behind large blue tarpaulins as workers began the process of drilling down through the feet of concrete poured over the coffin.
Before dawn, Arafat’s remains were finally reached. A Palestinian doctor and foreign forensic experts looked at the state of the corpse and decided against attempting to remove the whole thing. The Palestinian doctor instead took only samples, which were moved to a mosque where they were prepared for examination by international teams from France, Russia and Switzerland.
When he died so quickly in 2004 after a short unexplained illness, Palestinians suspected foul play—though French officials determined he died at a Paris military hospital from a stroke caused by a blood disorder.
Though Suha wouldn’t allow a postmortem examination at the time, earlier this year she gave some of her late husband’s personal items that were with him when he died, including his toothbrush, underwear and iconic kaffiyeh, to Al Jazeera television which sent them to Switzerland for tests. The Institut de Radiophysique discovered abnormal levels of polonium-210, a radioactive substance linked to the death of the former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006.
But after the tests were inconclusive, Suha Arafat, a French citizen, asked the French government to launch a murder inquiry. The Palestinian Authority, suspicious of Arafat’s widow—who is not a popular figure among Palestinians—and the French and Swiss experts called in Russian scientists to do separate analysis.
While the focus of Palestinians is on the Israelis, French magistrates have been questioning Palestinian officials who were with Arafat in the Muqata, believing it’s unlikely the PLO leader’s food or drink could have been poisoned without a collaborator inside the building.
The Israelis had an opportunity to interfere with food deliveries which passed through their checkpoints during the siege. But they had no way of knowing who would be eating what and the fact that there was no mass poisoning inside the Muqata would mean that Arafat’s food was contaminated by someone with direct access to it.
For eight years Israel has repeatedly denied killing Arafat and has asked the Palestinian leadership to release his medical records, which it has refused to do.
