On October 26 Arafat sat down for dinner. He began with a cream-based soup, the recipe for which he claimed had been handed down to him by his mother. Then came a fried piece of Saint Peter’s fish from the lake of Galilee and named after the catch the apostle Peter was reputed to have made before Jesus converted him. All the fish bones had been carefully removed before Arafat ate. Next Arafat consumed roast chicken, hummus, bread, tomatoes, and a green salad. The ingredients were, as usual, from the local market in Ramallah. The food was set out on the long table in Arafat’s workroom. There was also a nonalcoholic drink. Arafat had insisted it be prepared from homeopathic potions and herbs.
“He secretly chose them himself. The drink smelled awful. It made people unwell just sniffing it. But Arafat swallowed it as if it was champagne,” Dr. al-Kurdi would tell Al-Jazeera Television.
The drink was based on homeopathic ingredients not available to the souks of Ramallah. But they could be obtained in one of the upmarket alternative medicine outlets in Tel Aviv. Within hours Arafat was complaining of severe stomach pains. Dr. al-Kurdi diagnosed gastric flu. But when the prescription medicine did not help, the physician decided Arafat had a blood disorder, “perhaps one of the many types of leukemia.” But again the symptoms did not confirm that. Just a few hours later, more expert medical aid was on the way to Ramallah. President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt dispatched his personal medical team, including a cancer specialist. King Abdullah of Jordan also sent the best doctor available in Amman. Both teams recommended that the increasingly ill Arafat, whose symptoms could not be firmly diagnosed, be sent to Europe. President Chirac was contacted. He said the Percy Military Hospital outside Paris would make its own renowned specialists available to treat Arafat.
On October 29 the still-conscious Arafat was helicoptered out of the Ramallah compound. But by then the Arab world was already asking one question. Had Mossad’s chemists obtained a sample of the contents of Arafat’s homeopathic concoction? Had Meir Dagan done what his predecessors had resisted—out of the understandable fear of escalating the suicide bomber attacks—and taken charge of an audacious operation to assassinate Yasser Arafat?
Even as Arafat’s plane was heading toward Paris, Dr. al-Kurdi added his medical guess to the souk rumors. He said, “Poisoning is a strong possibility.” The other Arab doctors who had seen Arafat hinted darkly that they also did not rule out poisoning. In Paris, Arafat’s wife, Suha, compounded the intrigue by saying she alone would reveal details of his medical condition—but only when she received “guarantees of my own personal position” regarding the whereabouts of $2 billion of Palestinian Authority funds, which the International Monetary Fund, having carried out an audit in 2003, said were still missing. A deal would later be made in which the Palestinian Authority agreed to pay her $2 million a year for the rest of her life “in recognition of her importance to the Palestinian movement and in her husband’s life.” She had, in fact, not seen him for four years before she visited his bedside at the Percy Military Hospital. She had traveled from her large suite at the deluxe Hotel Le Bristol in Paris; Arafat had also bequeathed her a magnificent villa on the city’s elegant rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré.
But by the time the deal was cemented, the medical mystery of Arafat’s condition had deepened. He was variously reported as having liver failure, kidney failure, that he was brain dead, semiconscious, or unconscious. His French doctors refused to provide any details of scans, biopsies, or blood tests, which would have shown the condition of his vital organs. The information that dribbled out of the hospital came from Arafat’s Palestinian aides. Apart from Dr. al-Kurdi, none of them were qualified and had been denied further access to al-Kurdi’s long-time patient. Arafat’s aides announced on November 4 that Arafat was on a life-support system. Then abruptly the hospital spokesman said its doctors had found no trace of poisoning “having conducted two tests for a substance.” He would not say what substance Arafat had been tested for.
In the Arab world speculation and anger raged. Somewhere in the innuendos and half-truths certain inescapable facts floated to the surface. Mossad had used a lethal chemical agent to kill newspaper tycoon Robert Maxwell when he’d threatened to expose Mossad’s activities in his newspapers unless they agreed to help bail him out of his serious financial problems. Dr. Ian West, the Home Office pathologist who’d conducted Maxwell’s autopsy, had written in his report (a copy of which the author possesses): “We cannot rule out homicide being the cause.”
