New Telegraph

Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat, dies of COVID-19

 

One of the most prominent Palestinian political figures, Saeb Erekat, has died with Covid-19, Palestinian officials say.
The 65-year-old died at Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem.
Erekat was secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and an adviser to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, reports the BBC.
He was the Palestinians’ chief negotiator in peace talks with Israel for the past two and a half decades.
Erekat helped negotiate the landmark Oslo Accords in 1993, which created the Palestinian Authority and gave Palestinians limited self-governance in the West Bank and Gaza Strip for the first time since Israel occupied the territories in 1967.
He announced on 9 October that he had tested positive for coronavirus but his condition deteriorated and he was transferred to the Israeli hospital from his home in Jericho in the West Bank 10 days later.
Doctors said that treating him was a “huge challenge” because he had undergone a lung transplant three years ago and had a “weakened immune system and bacterial infection, in addition to coronavirus”.
Before his death he was put on a ventilator and placed in a medically induced coma.
Erekat was a proponent of the so-called two-state solution – an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel – to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and recently condemned moves by Arab states to normalise relations with Israel without it.
He called the UAE’s decision in August to formalise ties with Israel as “a killer to the two-state solution” and said the US was “part of the problem and becoming more irrelevant in the Middle East” over its support for Israel under President Donald Trump.
Erekat also called for international sanctions on Israel over its occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, and for a boycott of Israeli companies operating in the occupied territories.
His face was instantly recognisable. In the past three decades, when Palestinian and Israeli leaders met – in Madrid, Oslo, Washington, Camp David or Jerusalem – Saeb Erekat had a prominent place on negotiation teams.
As a fluent English speaker, he often briefed international diplomats and journalists, summoning us to his office in Ramallah or his home in Jericho.
Palestinians will feel his loss deeply at a time when relations with Israel are at a new low – and prospects for the creation of an independent Palestinian state, the goal of his life’s work, look increasingly dim.
However, on social media, some have also commented bitterly on the fact he died in an Israeli hospital.
In recent months, Saeb Erekat was closely involved as the Palestinian leadership decided to halt its long-standing co-operation with Israel on security and civil matters in response to its plans to annex parts of the occupied West Bank.
This meant the Palestinian Authority had stopped arranging transfers of ordinary Palestinian patients to East Jerusalem and paying for their treatment in Israel.

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