Saeb Erekat Dies After Contracting COVID 19
Jerusalem: Saeb Erekat, 65, one of the most experienced and high-profile spokesmen for the Palestinian cause over decades of dispute with Israel, died on Tuesday after contracting COVID-19, his family said. He was 65.
“With hearts full of sorrow and pain, and with patience, Erekat’s clan everywhere mourns to the Palestinian Arab people and to the Arab and Muslim nation Saeb Erekat,” his extended family clan posted on Facebook.
Fluent in English as well as his native Arabic, he was a high-profile spokesman for Palestinian leaders such as Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas, though never a serious candidate to succeed them.
Erekat, the secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), confirmed on Oct. 8 that he had contracted the coronavirus. Three years earlier he had undergone a lung transplant in the United States that left his immune system compromised.
He died after being hospitalized for weeks in Jerusalem’s Hadassah Medical Centre. The family said he had died from “complications resulting from contracting coronavirus”.
One of the youngest members of the Palestinian leadership, Erekat was unusual in not having spent decades in exile with Arafat and Abbas, the older generation of his Fatah faction, which dominates the PLO.
Although well known in diplomatic circles across the world and regularly featured in the international media, he was on the second tier of Palestinian politics and diplomacy.
In recent years, Erekat was the principal Palestinian face of a war of words with the Trump administration over a U.S. plan that would leave Israel in control of Jewish settlements and large parts of the occupied West Bank.
But he remained an advocate of the negotiated creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel even after peace talks collapsed in 2014.
A younger generation of Palestinians increasingly questioned whether such co-existence was possible, preferring instead a “one-state solution” of Israelis and Palestinians living together.
Having sat opposite Israeli leaders, Erekat regarded the one-state concept as unworkable, aware that Israel rejects it as a demographic liability as Palestinians would ultimately be the majority. His two-state vision was the only solution, he maintained.
“If not this year, in five years, 10 years, 50 years. But the unfortunate thing is the longer it takes, the more victims, the more people will be killed, the more violence, the more extremism. Saving lives is about going the path of two states, and it is doable,” he told Reuters in July 2019.
Erekat could be prickly in the face of criticism, but made a point of engaging in debate with critics, including Israelis.
