SUFFICVE IT TO SAY HE DIDN'T DIE AS HE SHOULD HAVE:

What killed Arafat? Infection a mystery (Steven Erlanger and Lawrence K. Altman, SEPTEMBER 8, 2005, The New York Times)

Yasser Arafat's medical records from the French military hospital where he died in November, which have been held in secrecy, reveal that he died of a stroke that resulted from a bleeding disorder caused by an unknown infection.

A first independent review of the records, obtained by The New York Times, shows that despite extensive testing, his doctors could not determine the underlying disease that killed him. But the records dispel one significant and widespread rumor - that Arafat died of AIDS. The course of his illness and pattern of his symptoms make AIDS highly unlikely, according to independent experts who have reviewed the records at the request of The Times.

They also suggest that poisoning was highly unlikely, although senior Palestinian officials continue to allege that Arafat, who died Nov. 11 at age 75 after an illness lasting a month, was indeed poisoned. [...]

No autopsy was performed because Arafat's wife objected to one,

The records make no mention of an AIDS test, a deficiency the experts found curious and even bizarre. An Israeli infectious disease specialist said he would have performed the test, which is now standard, if only to be thorough and to refute the rumors that surrounded the case.

News accounts during the Palestinian leader's illness made that specialist strongly suspect that Arafat had AIDS, he said.

But after studying the records, the specialist said that AIDS was improbable, given the swift onset of Arafat's intestinal troubles four hours after eating on the evening of Oct. 12.

A senior Palestinian official provided Arafat's medical records to Avi Isacharoff and Amos Harel, Israeli journalists who are working on a new edition of their book, "The Seventh War: How We Won and Why We Lost the War With the Palestinians." They agreed to share the records in collaboration with The Times, which did its own investigation.

The final days of Yasser Arafat (Avi Isacharoff and Amos Harel, Ha'aretz Magazine)

Israeli experts who analyzed the report drawn up by the medical team that treated Yasser Arafat in Paris say that the most likely possibility is that he was poisoned in a dinner meal on October 12, 2004. Arafat's personal physician insists that a test that was done on him in the French hospital whose results were removed from the post-mortem report found AIDS in his blood. In the revised edition of their book 'The Seventh War,' Avi Isacharoff and Amos Harel make public Arafat's post-mortem report, the Palestinian Authority's most closely guarded document, and reconstruct the last days of the Rais the rapid deterioration, the loss of memory, the fits of rage, Suha's takeover, the humiliation of senior Palestinian figures, the shouting at Jacques Chirac and the suspicious red blotches on the chairman's face.

"I know that the physicians in Paris found the AIDS virus in Arafat's blood," Dr. Ashraf al-Kurdi, the personal physician of the late Palestinian Authority chairman, says in a telephone interview from Amman. Dr. al-Kurdi, who was kept from joining the Palestinian delegation that accompanied Arafat on his final trip to Paris, does not say where he got this sensational information. To heighten the mystery, he also maintains that Arafat was poisoned and that the AIDS virus that was found in his blood "was injected into his body in order to camouflage the poisoning."

Strange as it may seem, al-Kurdi is not the only one who says that Arafat was infected with AIDS. Similar allegations are made by an Israeli physician, who was told about it by a French colleague who treated Arafat, and by sources in the Israeli defense establishment. Even though some of the symptoms of the mysterious disease that caused Arafat's death 10 months ago resemble those of AIDS, the detailed report prepared by the French medical team makes no mention of any test that would confirm or rule out the existence of the virus in his blood. Prof. Gil Lugassi, president of the Israeli Society of Hematology, who read the French medical report, says that the fact that this possibility was ignored is "simply inconceivable and very bizarre." "I can only assume," he says, "that if there had been an AIDS test with negative results, there would have been no problem saying so in the report."

On the other hand, senior figures in the Palestinian Authority (PA) are convinced that Israel is behind the mysterious death. They, too, cite weighty grounds. They all remember vividly the militant declarations of the Israeli leadership about the need to remove Arafat from power. Nor have they forgotten Israel's attempted assassination of a senior Hamas official, Khaled Meshal, in Amman, with the use of a mysterious poison that was unknown to Jordan's top physicians. An official commission of inquiry appointed by the PA to investigate Arafat's death has held up the publication of its conclusions for months.

In the new edition of their book "The Seventh War," which deals with the five-year confrontation between Israel and the Palestinians that began in September 2000, the journalists Avi Isacharoff (Israel Radio) and Amos Harel (Haaretz) devote a chapter to a detailed probe of the last weeks of Arafat's life. They make public for the first time the main points of the report drawn up by the medical team of Percy military hospital, in the Paris suburb of Clamart, where Arafat was treated in the last two weeks of his life. The French physicians do not think that Arafat was poisoned, but also refrain from adducing an alternative cause of death. "It is not possible to determine a cause that will explain the combination of symptoms that caused the patient's death," the summarizing report of the hospital's intensive care ward states.

An abridged version of the chapter on Arafat's death which includes, together with details of the medical report and the claims that the AIDS virus was found in his blood, a description of the struggles for control and succession that took place behind the scenes in the PA as Arafat lay dying is published here for the first time.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 8, 2005 12:00 AM