Experts: If Arafat was poisoned, it was not by polonium-210

year, Hamas sent two suicide bombers to try and blow up an oil tank farm near the port of Ashdod, even though Israel had earlier let Hamas know that attacks on Israel’s critical infrastructure would cost Hamas heavily. The two suicide bombers were detected and killed before they reached their target, but Israel decided that the message to Hamas needed to be reinforced, and its two leaders were taken out.

Arik Sharon, who was Israel’s prime minister at the time of Arafat’s death, was also heard, on more than one occasion, to suggest that the Middle East would be a better place without Arafat in the picture. So when Arafat was taken ill in October 2004, and when Palestinian and French doctors – he was flown to Paris in late October for treatment – could not identify the source on the underlying infection which led to his death in mid-November, the Palestinians, and many in the Arab street, charged that the Mossad poisoned him.

These charges could not be conclusively investigated because Arafat’s widow refused to allow an autopsy to be performed.

What is new in the current round of charges, then, is not the accusation that Israeli agents poisoned Arafat – but the fact that the poison was identified as polonium-210 (earlier charges of poisoning claimed the poison used was thallium or ricin).

Experts doubt that Arafat was poisoned with polonium 210, if he was poisoned at all. An Israeli terrorism expert who specializes in CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear) terrorism, for example, dismisses the charges becasue they violate the laws of physics.

The Jerusalem Post quotes Dr. Ely Karmon of the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya’s International Institute for Counterterrorism, to say that the characteristics of polonium-210 preclude it from having killed Arafat. The half life of polonium would make it impossible for the substance to have been discovered in such high levels in Arafat’s belongings eight years after Arafat’s death.

Polonium-210 has a half-life of 138 days, meaning that half of the substance decays roughly every four-and-a-half months. Since only miniscule amounts of the substance would suffice to kill someone, it is not possible that eight years after Arafat’s death, Swiss scientists would find polonium levels of 54 millibecquerels (mBq) and 180 millibecquerels on his belonging. If Arafat was killed by polonium poisoning, and the killers used the same amount of polonium-210 to kill him that the Russian secret service used in 2006 in a London restaurant to kill Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB agent who became a critic of Putin, then there would be no traces, or hardly any traces, of the substance left after eight years.

Put another way: for polonium-210 to be discovered today in Arafat’s clothing in the amounts reported by the Swiss radiation specialist, would mean that such large quantities of the material had to be used – unnecessarily — eight years ago that not only Arafat, but his entourage and many of the doctors, nurses, and patients at the Hôpital d’instruction des armées Percy in Clamart, the suburb west of Paris where the hospital is located, would be dead as well of radiation poisoning.

Karmon said that the only explanation for the presence of such high-levels of polonium-210 now is that the material has been recently planted in Arafat’s belonging.

“If it had been used to for poisoning, minimal levels should be seen now. Yet much higher levels were found. Someone planted the polonium much later,” said Karmon.

Karmon also noted that if it were true that Arafat’s belonging had traces of polonium, then the places where those items were kept would also retain traces of the radioactive substance. “Did Al-Jazeera check the home of Suha Arafat in Paris and Malta where she kept the items for traces of polonium?” Al Jazeera’s report did not include a radiation analysis of the closets where the items were kept.

Karmon raises another point: “If Suha Arafat safeguarded these contaminated materials, why, after seven years, was she not poisoned too? She touched these things and Arafat in hospital,” he added.