Yasser Arafat

Leader of Fatah and then also of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Yasser Arafat remained for several decades a controversial figure in the expression of the national aspirations of the Palestinians before appearing for Israel as a partner in discussions within the framework of the process. of Israeli-Palestinian peace in the 1990s.

Yasser Arafat then represented the Palestinians in the various peace negotiations and signed the Oslo Accords in 1993. He became the first president of the new Palestinian Authority and received the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize alongside Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin.

From 2001, after the failure of the Taba summit and the outbreak of the second intifada, he gradually lost his credit with part of his people who reproached him for the corruption of his authority. He found himself isolated on the international scene while the Israelis elected Ariel Sharon to the post of Prime Minister of Israel, leading to a hardening of the Israeli position towards the Palestinian leader, forced to no longer leave Ramallah. This isolation was only broken on the eve of his death, when he was rushed to Clamart, where he died at the age of 75.

In 2012, the remains of Yasser Arafat were exhumed to study the hypothesis of death by polonium 210 poisoning. The team of Swiss experts concluded that it was poisoning, but the Russian and French teams concluded that it was death from old age. following gastroenteritis. According to the Swiss newspaper Le Temps, Yasser Arafat died of polonium poisoning in 2004, the Al-Jazeera news channel and his widow Souha said on Wednesday. They are based on the report from the Institute of Radiophysics of Lausanne, which analyzed the remains of the former Palestinian leader, who died in 2004 in Paris.