Palestinians prefer fabrications over truth
reprinted from Daily Alert, July 5, 2012
As PA Prepares to Exhume Arafat’s Body, Israel Calls Poisoning Claim "Baseless" (Ha’aretz)
As the Palestinian Authority prepared to exhume the body of former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat after a Swiss lab announced that it found elevated levels of polonium on Arafat’s belongings, Israeli government officials on Wednesday rejected suggestions that Israel may have poisoned him with the lethal radioactive isotope.
"The report is baseless," said one senior official, adding that it was not Israel that decided to keep the late Palestinian leader’s medical records closed.
"The circumstances of Arafat’s death are not a mystery," said Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor. "He was treated in France, in a French hospital by French doctors and they have all the medical information."
See also Rewriting the Arafat Story – Alex Fishman (Ynet News)
Ahmad Jibril, the head of the Popular Front and an Arafat rival, said that top PLO officials told him that Arafat died of AIDS.
In Israel as well, intelligence officials estimated that he died of AIDS or of another infection that prompted his bodily systems to collapse.
On the eve of his death, Arafat was perceived by Israel’s defense establishment as a first-rate public relations asset: He was unstable, confused, isolated in his headquarters and not functioning well.
At that point, Israel had no interest in assassinating him.
See also For the Palestinians’ Sake, It’s Time to Kill Off Arafat – Lenny Ben-David (Times of Israel)