Ramallah: The head of the Palestinian team investigating the death of Yasser Arafat on Tuesday accused Israel of assassinating the Palestinian leader in a Paris Hospital.
The inquiry committee has been able to identify the assassin of former president Yasser Arafat," said Tawfiq Tirawi, the head of the probe opened in 2009.
"Israel is responsible," he said, without giving further details other than to add that "we still need some time to elucidate the exact circumstances of this assassination".
Tirwai comments came on the eve of the 11th anniversary of Arafat's death and two months after French judges closed an investigation into claims he was murdered, without bringing any charges.
Palestinian President Yasser Arafat died in hospital in France in November 2004, weeks after falling ill at his compound in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
Israeli forces had kept him isolated there for three years, accusing him of sponsoring a wave of deadly attacks by Palestinian militants.
According to the records, the 75-year-old's illness began four hours after he ate a meal on the evening of 12 October 2004 inside the Muqataa presidential compound in Ramallah.
For the next two weeks, he vomited and had abdominal pain and diarrhoea, but did not have a fever. He was seen by a team of Palestinian, Egyptian, Jordanian and Tunisian doctors, and was treated for flu and thrombocytopenia, an abnormally low blood platelet count.
It was only once Arafat arrived in Paris that he was diagnosed with a serious blood disorder - disseminated intravascular coagulation (DIC) - which the French doctors were never able to control and which led to his death.
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