“I will open the gates of hell on senior Palestinian officials,” claimed the widow of arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat, whom PA brass have blasted over her defense of the UAE after its peace deal with Israel.
By Yakir Benzion, United With Israel
Yasser Arafat’s widow has stirred up a hornet’s nest of controversy after she made a surprise apology to the United Arab Emirates for the insults heaped on the UAE and its leaders for making peace with Israel.
Coming out after years of keeping a low profile, Arafat gave a surprise interview to Israel’s Channel 11 News when Palestinians slammed her for appearing to support the UAE after it establishes diplomatic relations with the Jewish state, despite the lack of an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement.
Two weeks ago Suha Arafat, who has lived in France for years, posted that she was embarrassed by the hurtful comments Palestinians made about the UAE.
“I want to apologize, in the name of the honorable Palestinian people, to the Emirati people and their leadership for the desecration and burning of the UAE flag in Jerusalem … and for insulting the symbols of the beloved UAE country,” she said in comments widely reported in the Arab press.
After Arafat received threats from the Palestinian Authority, she agreed to do an interview with the Israelis and hurled some criticism of her own at the Palestinian leadership.
She warned senior PA officials that if they hurt her or her family members, they would fight back.
“I will open the gates of hell against them,” Suha Arafa said. “From what Yasser said about them, I [will] burn them in front of their people. ”
According to Suha, the PA has already begun harassing her family members, and her brother – the Palestinian ambassador to Cyprus – has been summoned for questioning in Ramallah after refusing to organize anti-Emirates activities at the embassy compound.
Arafat also didn’t hold back on hammering the functionaries who are surrounding Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), 85, who took over after her husband died in 2004.
“He is far from all this but they are misleading him. I love Abu Mazen. They are all misleading him. Everyone is misleading him and waiting for the moment [to replace him]. But Abu Mazen will live 100 years because his health is good,” she said, claiming he would outlive the late Shimon Peres, who died at 93.
“But those around him? They want to destroy the Arafat family. We are stronger, we have more people than them,” she said, claiming the head of Abu Mazen’s bureau is leading the smear campaign and calling her a “traitor.”
She and Yasser Arafat have one daughter, Zahwa, and Suha said that “if her hair falls out of her head or on the heads of her family members, she will hold the Palestinian Authority responsible for their lives.
“Is it all just because I called not to burn flags?,” she told Channel 11. “Is that why the Palestinian Authority receives money from Israel and the Americans – to threaten the whole world?”
“Traitor? Enough with the slogans. After all, the Palestinians are sitting with the Israelis, including … the Mossad and the Israel army intelligence,” she noted.
In a 2013 interview on Dubai TV, Suha Arafat admitted that after her husband rejected the offer of a Palestinian state at Camp David in 2000, Yasser Arafat told her he was going to launch another intifada, a code word for massive waves of deadly terror attacks. That armed conflict cost thousands of lives and doomed the peace process.
“Immediately after the failure of the Camp David [negotiations], I met him in Paris … he said to me, ‘You should remain in Paris.’ I asked him why, and he said, ‘Because I am going to start an intifada.”