AMMAN, 6 November 2004 — Shock and disbelief gripped Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan as Yasser Arafat fought for his life yesterday, with residents praying the feared death of their people’s historic leader would not trigger civil war. “Our hearts are breaking and we do not want to believe” that Arafat is dying, said Omar Khamiss, who runs a sports club in Baqaa, the largest of Jordan’s 10 refugee camps.
“People are nervous, they are glued to their television sets and praying that God will extend his life,” he said. Arafat, 75, was lying yesterday in a coma in a Paris hospital amid conflicting reports on his condition. Khamiss, whose family fled to Jordan after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War — as did most of Baqaa’s estimated 120,000 residents — hoped for Palestinian unity in the event of his death.
“We hope our people inside (the territories) ... will agree on a united leadership representing all Palestinian factions,” he said. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon “is betting that there will be a civil war after Arafat’s death, and we hope that will not happen,” he said.
Around half if not more of Jordan’s 5.3 million population are of Palestinian origin, including 1.7 refugees. Arafat is lying “between life and death” and in a reversible coma, Palestinian spokeswoman Leila Shahid said earlier in Paris, denying reports he was brain dead. Amid the confusion, refugees in Jordan were pondering whether their president had been poisoned. “There are many doubts in our minds that he could have been poisoned by people with links to Mossad (Israeli intelligence services). I wouldn’t put it past them,” Khamiss said.
His assistant at the club, Nafez Sarissi, said he was “convinced” Arafat was harmed in some way before falling ill. “What I fear most now is that there will be a political vacuum (in the territories) and, even God forbid, civil war,” Sarissi said. “The Palestinians now, more than ever, need to close ranks and overcome this phase at the least possible cost,” he said.
Abu Haytham, an estate agent from Wihdat camp in eastern Amman, said he hoped a “respectable” leader would succeed Arafat because “we are facing occupation and Israel does not want peace even if someone came and surrendered to them all of Palestine.” In the Ain El-Hilweh camp in Lebanon, with eyes swollen from overnight vigils, Palestinian refugees across for the recovery of Arafat. Thousands of refugees, many wearing the traditional Arab checkered scarf, converged on mosques in the Lebanese shantytown on the outskirts of the southern city of Sidon and the 11 other camps across the country.
Since news of the drastic worsening of Arafat’s health condition on Thursday, the camps have been witnessing continuous flows of spontaneous candle-lit demonstrations and overnight wakes for prayers at home. With great sorrow written on their faces, refugees at Ain El-Hilweh mosques repeated verses from the Qur’an during the day for “the recovery, loyalty and allegiance to President Yasser Arafat.”
Mahmud Hamad, a member of Arafat’s mainstream Fatah movement, wiped away tears from his eyes before laying down his arms and joining the prayers. “I will keep praying until Arafat recovers and I have also asked my wife and children at home to pray for him,” said the militant, wearing a T-shirt with Arafat’s picture.
Ahmad, a member of the Hamas resistance movement, also joined the prayers because “we are all praying for Palestine and we are appealing for the recovery of Yasser Arafat who is the symbol of the Palestinian cause.”
Across Ain El-Hilweh, banners called for “praying for the recovery of Abu Ammar,” the nom-de-guerre of the 75-year-old Palestinian leader who was flown earlier this week to France where he remains in a coma. “He had sacrificed his life to fight for the Palestinians’ right to return to their homes from which the Jews had forced them out since 1948,” at the establishment of the state of Israel, said Khaled Ahmad.
In Sidon, prominent Lebanese Sunni Muslim Sheikh Maher Hammud, the imam of the Jerusalem mosque in the southern capital, told worshippers that “we are sad for Arafat, who is a great leader, because he had been abandoned by all.” After the prayers, the worshippers opened their palms to make appeals to God to “save Palestine and the resistance in Palestine.”
In the Rashidiyeh camp near the southern port city of Tyre, similar prayers were held in mosques, protected by a deployment of armed Fatah militants to keep order in the advent of news of Arafat’s death. With eyes red and swollen from praying and crying during the night, Ihsan Al-Jamal, 48, was “already regretting a father.”
