The Palestinians are marking the 20th anniversary of the death of Yasser Arafat, the first chairman of the Palestinian Authority who signed the Oslo Accords with Israel, but who was also behind a series of terrorist attacks against Israel and its citizens, leaving hundreds of casualties.
While the PA holds its ceremonies on Monday commemorating the man who once was Israel's main adversary, the current Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, is visiting Riyadh, Saudi Arabia for the Arab-Islamic summit. The summit will discuss ending the war and supporting the Palestinians, and Abbas will take advantage of the occasion and speak about the war in Gaza.
"We will preserve Arafat's legacy and not stray from it. We will remain rooted in our land," stated Abbas, who added that it is impossible to abolish the existence of the Palestinian people, just as it is impossible to eliminate the Palestinian issue. "Our people in Gaza are subject to a second Nakba. The occupation has turned the Gaza Strip into an inhabitable area."
Arafat, the founder of Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organization, died at the age of 75 on November 11, 2004 at the Percy Army Training Hospital in Clamart, near Paris. Before he was the chairman of the Palestinian Authority, he was responsible for countless attacks and the deaths of many Israelis, and was considered one of the main factors in the failure of the Oslo Accords.
He founded Fatah together with a group of other Palestinians in the 1950s, and became the movement's official spokesperson in 1968. In 1974, he addressed the United Nations General Assembly in New York, where he said: "I came to you carrying the revolutionary rifle in one hand, and an olive branch in the other. Don't drop the olive branch from my hand."
In September 1993, as part of the peace process with Israel, he signed with Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin the Oslo Accords that led to the establishment of the Palestinian Authority.
In 2000, the Al-Aqsa Intifada broke out - according to Israel at the behest of Arafat - during which Palestinian terrorists murdered hundreds of Israelis with almost daily attacks throughout the country. Israel accused Arafat of being the one directing the acts of terrorism, and in the last two and a half years of his life, mobilized troops around his office in Ramallah.
Eight years after his death, his widow Suha filed a complaint with the court in Nantes claiming that he had been poisoned and murdered. Arafat's grave was opened for several hours and investigative teams from Switzerland, France and Russia collected samples. They concluded he was allegedly poisoned by a radioactive element but French experts finally determined they were naturally occurring in the environment. Finally, the French Attorney General stated that it cannot be determined that Arafat was poisoned to death as claimed by his widow.
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