Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Yasser Arafat’s Widow Says She Tried To Leave Palestinian Leader ‘100 Times’

Suha Arafat, the widow of Yasser Arafat, said she tried to leave him “hundreds of times, but he wouldn’t let me.”

Arafat also told the Turkish newspaper Sabah that she would not have married the Palestinian leader had she known how difficult life with him would be.

“My life with him was hard. However, my life without him is even harder,” she said. “It is as if I am walking in a field covered with mines and I have no idea when one will go off. We were married for 22 years; however it felt like it was 50.

“If I had known what I would have to go through; I definitely would not have gotten married. I was with a great leader, but I was also all alone.”

Yasser Arafat died in November 2004. His body was recently exhumed from its crypt in Ramallah in the West Bank at the request of his wife to test his remains for traces of radioactive poisoning.

Arafat, who was 33 years younger than her husband with whom she eloped on her 27th birthday, converted from Christianity to Islam. She said she believed her marriage to Yasser Arafat was her “fate,” a concept in the Koran.

She told the newspaper, “Everyone knows how he wouldn’t permit me to leave. Especially those in his servitude, they know very well what it was like.”

Arafat said that she is focused on her 17-year-old daughter, Zahwa, and that she is not interested in remarrying.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.