![A mural depicts Former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat on his 16th death anniversary in Khan Yunis, Gaza on 11 November 2020 [Abed Rahim Khatip/Anadolu Agency]](https://i0.wp.com/www.middleeastmonitor.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/20201111_2_45318616_59687232.jpg?fit=1200%2C800&ssl=1)
Former member of Palestine’s Fatah Central Committee, Ribhi Halloum, confirmed that “the late Palestinian President Yasser Arafat was assassinated by people close to him”.
“What [former Qatari Prime Minister, Hamad] Bin Jassem said confirms what I have said over the past years, that Arafat’s killer is a criminal known to the Palestinian Authority and its leaders,” Halloum told Quds Press.
The Palestinian Authority’s leadership has made a political decision not to reveal the identity of the real killer and to close the file permanently, Halloum explained.
Earlier on Wednesday, Bin Jassim said, in an interview with the Kuwaiti Al-Qabas newspaper, that “the sudden change in Arafat’s health indicates that something was being hatched for him, and perhaps there were those who had given him something in order to eliminate him.”
“This is a fact. Yasser Arafat was certainly killed, and by people around him,” he added.
Arafat died on 11 November 2004, in a military hospital in the French capital, Paris, after his health deteriorated rapidly, after being besieged by Israel for several months in the presidential headquarters in the city of Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank.