The Last Days of Yasser Arafat
Witness History
BBC
4.5 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 22 November 2018
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat died in November 2004. French doctors treating him at the military hospital in France where he died said Arafat had an unidentified blood disorder and gave the cause of death as a stroke. Since then there have been allegations that he was poisoned. Leila Shahid was the Palestinian ambassador to France in 2004, and was with Yasser Arafat during his final days. She's been talking to Louise Hidalgo about that time.
Picture: Yasser Arafat attending Friday prayers at his headquarters in Ramallah a year before his death (Credit: Antoine Gyori/AGP/Corbis via Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know. |
| 0:04.7 | My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds. |
| 0:08.5 | As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices. |
| 0:18.0 | What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars, |
| 0:24.6 | poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples. |
| 0:29.7 | If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds. |
| 0:36.2 | Welcome to the Witness Podcast here on the BBC World Service with me Louis Adagogo. |
| 0:42.0 | Today we go back to November 2004 and an account of the last days of the |
| 0:46.9 | Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. The 75-year-old had been airlifted from his headquarters |
| 0:52.4 | in the West Bank City of Ramallah 13 days earlier, |
| 0:55.6 | and flown to a French military hospital near Paris, where he died. |
| 0:59.7 | Monsieur Arafat, resident of the authority Palestinian and decayed. |
| 1:05.0 | The Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat has died. |
| 1:08.0 | He died on the 11th of November, between 4 and 5 in the morning, very early in the morning. |
| 1:13.5 | Leila Shaheed had known Yes Arafat since the 1960s, |
| 1:17.5 | and was one of the small group of Palestinians who were with him during his final days. |
| 1:22.0 | I was ambassador to France and I got a call maybe a week before he actually came from my |
| 1:30.0 | Prime Minister who told me that the impressions of all his doctors were that it was a |
| 1:36.4 | more grave situation than just an infection in his intestines and that now he really needs to go to a hospital. |
| 1:45.0 | But Leila was told Arofat was refusing to go. |
| 1:48.0 | He was worried that with relations with the Israelis so bad, if he left the West Bank he'd not be allowed to return. |
| 1:54.8 | Could France intervene? |
... |
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