http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1126779.html
Last update - 03:30 09/11/2009
What Arafat's wife told him on his deathbed
By Avi Issacharoff and Jack Khoury
Tags: Suha Arafat, Fatah
When Yasser Arafat was on his deathbed, his wife Suha read him passages
from the Koran and urged him to trounce the prime minister at the time, Ariel
Sharon.
"When he lost consciousness for 15 days, the doctors told me to talk to
him about things he liked to hear or things he hated to hear," she told a Saudi
women's weekly ahead of the fifth anniversary this week of the Palestinian
leader's death.
"And so, when I was with him in his room in the intensive care unit, I
read him passages from the Koran and prayers."
Using his nom de guerre, Suha Arafat said in a rare interview: "I would
say to him, 'Get up Abu Amar, don't you want to see your [daughter] Zahwa? Get
up so you can defeat your enemy [Ariel] Sharon."
Suha was honored to be Yasser Arafat's second love, after Palestine, she
said.
"When I married him, I knew what I was in for," she said. "I knew that
his first love was always Palestine and its capital, Jerusalem. But it was an
honor for me to be the second love, after Palestine."
When Suha first met Yasser, she was frightened, she told the paper.
"At the beginning I was attracted to the leader of the revolution, then
to the courage and masculinity and intelligence, and then also to the romance
there was in him," she said.
"I hope he went to paradise."
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