Death of PLO Secretary General Saëb Erakat de Covid-19
The Secretary General of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Saëb Erekat, died Tuesday of coronavirus, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas announced.
Saëb Erekat died at the age of 65 at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. He had previously been diagnosed with chronic lung problems and tested positive for coronavirus, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) announced on 8 October. Since then, he has limited his commitments, suffering from pulmonary fibrosis, he also underwent a lung transplant in 2017 in an American hospital.
"The departure of a brother and friend, of the great fighter, Dr Saëb Erekat, is a great loss for Palestine and for our people, and it saddens us deeply," Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas reacted in a statement in Arabic in Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank.
Secretary General of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) since 2015 and right-hand man of leaders Yasser Arafat, who died in 2004, and current Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, Erekat was the visible image of his people before Israel and the international community.
"Palestine today lacks a patriotic leader, a great fighter who played a crucial role in raising the Palestinian flag," Abbas added, declaring a three-day national mourning session.
Saëb Erekat's presence at the secret talks that led to the Oslo Accords in 1993, at all the Washington-sponsored peace conferences from Camp David to Annapolis, has been essential to the building of Palestinian autonomy over the last quarter of a century.
The man commonly referred to as "Doctor Saëb" recently criticised the normalisation of relations between Israel and the Arab countries, decided without prior peace between the Palestinians and the Hebrew state, he said, "undermines the possibility of peace" between Israel and the Palestinians.
"Saëb will not see his people freed from the occupation, but generations of Palestinians will remember him as one of the giants who devoted his life to independence," Ayman Odeh, head of the "United List" of Arab Israeli parties, said Tuesday on Twitter.
"We will miss you, my friend," wrote the United Nations envoy to the Middle East, Nickolay Mladenov. "You remained convinced that Israel and Palestine could live in peace, you never gave up negotiating and you proudly defended your people," he said.
The leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, presented the "condolences" of the Islamist movement to the "brothers" of Fatah, the secular party of Abbas and Erakat.
In Cairo, the Egyptian Foreign Ministry said that "the Palestinian cause has lost an unshakeable fighter (...) who spent his life asserting the rights of the Palestinian people through politics and diplomacy".
"As a defender of Palestinian self-determination, Saëb Erakat has led controversial debates, but has always relied on negotiations with Israel (...) without ever losing courage and hope, even in the face of the health problems of recent years", said German diplomat Heiko Maas.
