RAMALLAH, West Bank, 12 November 2004 — Yasser Arafat was a survivor who cheated death on several fronts, not least his health, during a 40-year career as the symbol of the struggle for Palestinian statehood. The 75-year-old veteran leader survived a series of assassination bids as well as a plane crash, the 1982 Israeli siege of west Beirut and a host of health scares.
After a miraculous escape from the plane crash in the Libyan desert in April 1992, Arafat underwent an operation in Amman to remove a blood clot from the brain, and rumors about his deteriorating health have abounded ever since.
In 1994, hospital sources in Tunis, where he was based at the time, claimed he had been admitted after a heart attack, but his entourage fiercely denied the report.
Shortly before his 70th birthday, rumors that he was suffering from Parkinson’s disease began to circulate, based on the fact that he had become very pale and frequently had difficulty expressing himself.
Doctors said his trembling hands, jaw and lower lip were the first signs of the illness.
Ever since his rise to the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1969, the “Old Man” has somehow outfoxed plots by a host of enemies in both the Israeli and Palestinian camps. Already in October 1969, Arafat was sent a letter bomb which he blamed on the Israeli secret service. Two years later, he was ambushed during a visit to Palestinian bases on the Golan front and his driver was killed. In what his aides called a miraculous “escape”, Israeli commandos helicoptered in the night to Beirut on April 13, 1973 and killed three of his lieutenants, but the PLO chairman was not to be found. The constant threats to his life meant he had to keep house-hopping and never slept in the same bed for two nights in a row or under the same roof. During his globe-trotting days of the 1980s and 1990s, the travel plans were kept under wraps. And he would rarely part company with the powerful Smith and Wesson pistol on his belt.
Known by his nom de guerre of Abu Ammar, he also survived combat on the front line. During Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Arafat escaped the siege of west Beirut and was evacuated by sea with his fighters with France’s help. A year later, in November 1983, France again mounted a maritime rescue when Arafat and his supporters were in danger of being driven into the sea by Syrian-backed Palestinian rebels in northern Lebanon. Having changed his travel plans at the last minute, Arafat was unscathed when his convoy was shot up on the highway to Damascus from the northern town of Tripoli.
His exile to Tunis was not free of danger.
On Oct.1, 1985, his headquarters in a suburb of the Tunisian capital was almost totally destroyed in an Israeli air raid which killed 17 people. Arafat was headed for his HQ when the bombs started to fall and made a timely U-turn. Arafat did not use a private plane of his own, but instead would at the last minute turn to airlines of friendly countries. Often, to the pilot’s consternation, he would ask to change course and even PLO officials traveling with their leader would not know the final destination.
He had car crashes on both the Damascus-Beirut and the Amman-Baghdad highways.
Not the least peril he faced was his confinement since December 2001 to his headquarters in the West Bank town of Ramallah and the Israeli army bombardment of the compound known as the Muqata.
In September 2003, after a bout of flu and stomach pains, according to Palestinian sources, a medical team was dispatched to the West Bank to examine him. But the patient soon declared himself cured.
A week later, the British newspaper The Guardian, quoted sources close to Arafat as saying he had suffered a minor heart attack.
That led to rumors which surfaced in Time magazine that he might have been suffering from stomach cancer but tests showed only that he had gallstones which did not require surgery.
