Nine years on from his death the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat remains one of the most
controversial and undoubtedly the most famous figure in Palestinian history and for many
people remains a symbol of the Palestinian struggle for independence.
And now a forensic report by Swiss scientists has confirmed what many have suspected or
believed for the past nine years.
But there is evidence to support the theory that Arafat was poisoned with polonium - the
same radioactive chemical that was used to kill the former Russian spy Alexander Litvienko
in London in 2006.
To be clear however the scientists say the results of their investigation moderately
support this theory.
In other words they can't be sure.
But Arafat's widow Suha Arafat seems convinced.
She hasn't said exactly who she suspects of killing her husband but has acknowledged he
had many enemies and told Reuters that the polonium must have been administered by someone
in his close circle.
Now we know that some of you watching will know all about Yasser Arafat, the events surrounding
his death and why someone might have wanted to poison him but for those of you who don't,
we thought we'd put together this quick-ish explainer for you.
So let's start at the beginning.
Yasser Arafat was born - wait for it - Mohammed Abdel Rahman Abdel Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini
on the 24th August 1929 in Jerusalem, Cairo, or Gaza depending on who you ask.
Arafat always insisted he was born in Jerusalem the city that he saw as the Palestinian capital.
Not much is known about Arafat's up-bringing but the consensus seems to be that he spent
most of it in Cairo.
What we do know is that he had an Egyptian accent so probably spent quite a few of his
early years there.
By the age of 17 Arafat was already trying to further the Palestinian Nationalist cause,
helping to smuggle arms from Egypt into Palestine ahead of the 1948 war.
And eight years later came a big moment in Arafat's history.
While attending a congress in Prague he allegedly started wearing the keffiyeh for the first
time.
The keffiyeh is a traditional chequered headdress that became Arafat's trademark and a symbol
of Palestinian nationalism.
It was at this time that Arafat also started referring to himself as Mr Palestine.This
might have started off as a bit of a joke but the nickname stuck.
In the late 1950s Arafat became one of the founding members of Fatah - the Palestinian
nationalist guerrilla organisation turned political party.
Fatah is currently governing the West Bank despite losing out to Hamas in the last Palestinian
parliamentary election in 2006.
But anyway, back to the 1950s.
At this point Arafat and Fatah's vision consisted of bringing about a full-scale Palestinian
revolution or war with the goal of restoring full Palestinian control to all of historic
Palestine including all of the land that became part of the Israeli state in 1948.
Along with his close friend Abu Jihad, Arafat formed Fatah's military wing known as Al-Aqsa
which started off as nothing more than a five man underground cell.
This cell launched its first attack on the Israeli state in 1965 and was soon upsetting
both the Israeli governments and the neighboring Arab governments.
These Arab governments were supposedly planning their own ways of liberating Palestine.
At one point Arafat was even imprisoned in a Syrian jail for a bit.
After the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, Fatah was the only credible Arab fighting force left
and the group took on a central role in the Palestinian Nationalist movement.
Volunteers flocked to join and Fatah became a state within a state in Jordan where the
group was camping out in exile.
In 1969 Arafat took over as chairman of the Palestine Liberation organisation, an umbrella
organisation created by the Arab league five years earlier that was made up of various
Palestinian Nationalist groups.
You will probably know this organisation as the PLO.
In the years that followed, members of the various PLO factions carried out hijackings,
bombings and assassinations and until 1991 the group was still considered a terrorist
organisation by the US.
But back to Arafat again, after being kicked out of Jordan by the country's king in 1970
Arafat and Fatah went to Lebanon and from that point on Arafat began to edge away from
his initial dream of a full-scale revolution towards a more political solution and as the
Fatah movement grew and Arafat's power and status increased he became less and less a
guerrilla fighter and more and more a statesman.
So much so that in 1974 the United Nations recognised the PLO as the "sole legitimate
representative of the Palestinian people" and Arafat became the first representative
of a non-governmental entity to address the UN's general assembly.
There's so much we could say about what happened during the ten or so years after this for
one thing Israel invaded Lebanon in retaliation to Palestinian raids on the Lebanese-Israeli
border and Arafat and Fatah were forced to move on yet again to Tunisia.
Not to mention the first large-scale Palestinian uprising known as the first intifada but in
the interest in keeping this explainer succinct we'll have to skip on to 1988.
It was in this year that one of the biggest milestones in the Arafat and Fatah story took
place and what many still see as the moment that Arafat turned his back on the Palestinian
people and their cause.
In the November of that year Arafat convinced the rest of the PLO's leadership to fight
for a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital, but to exist alongside Israel.
In other words the PLO would no longer be claiming the right of Palestinian's to the
whole of historic Palestine and the following month Arafat declares his acceptance of the
UN security council resolution 242 which proclaims Israel's right "to exist in peace and security"
and denounced "terrorism in all its forms".
This decision unlocked many diplomatic for Arafat, Fatah and the PLO including those
of Israel's biggest ally, the US.
But this decision also made Arafat many enemies within the Palestinian Nationalist movement.
Ultimately however this decision led to the infamous 1993 Oslo Accords or peace talks
that gave the Palestinian's limited territorial sovereignty and partial control over civil
affairs in the West Bank and Gaza.
This is Arafat shaking hands with the then Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, on
the lawn at the White House to seal the deal.
The following year both men were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Several fundamental issues remain undecided however such as what was to happen to Jewish
settlements on occupied Palestinian land, the future of Palestinian's who were made
refugees in the 1948 war and whose homes had been in what was now the Israeli state as
well as the future of Jerusalem which both Israeli's and Palestinian's each claimed as
their capital.
But these were left to be dealt with at a later date.
In 1996 Arafat was then elected President of the newly created Palestinian authority
by an 83% landslide.
But fast forward to 2000 and the talks at Camp David in the US where Israel and Palestine
were due to thrash out the fundamental issues we mentioned before in order to create a fully-fledged
Palestinian state and things were looking far less rosy.
The peace talks failed with all blame being laid at the feet of Arafat by Israel and the
US.
In his defence, Arafat said, "the Arab leader has not been born who would give up Jerusalem."
A second very bloody intifada then followed and in 2002 Arafat found himself blockaded
at his West Bank headquarters by the Israeli's who accused him of instigating terror.
That same year the then US President George W. Bush pronounced Arafat unfit to rule and
a prime target along with Iraq's Sadam Hussein for regime change.
Of course Bush failed to achieve this regime change but two years on in October 2004 Arafat
fell ill and was flown to Paris by the French government where he died on the 11th November.
The official cause of Arafat's death was a massive stroke but French doctors at the time
said they were unable to determine the origin of his illness.
And with Arafat's many enemies, suspicion has always surrounded the cause of his death
and possibly the people behind it.