A Fatah party official says Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat had tacitly urged Palestinians to launch the Second Intifada following the breakdown of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks at Camp David in 2000.
“Yasser Arafat, may he rest in peace, signed the Oslo Accords and came here,” Abdel-Elah Atirs said in an interview with Palestine TV earlier this month. “When he went to Camp David and saw that Jerusalem, or part of it, was not part of the deal, he came back and hinted to us to start the Second Intifada.”
“Fatah’s thermometer is ready to move in any direction,” he added, according to a translation of his remarks by the Middle East Media Research Institute.
Atirs, a member of the Fatah Revolutionary Council, also said Arafat was behind deadly rioting in 1996 after Israel opened the Western Wall Tunnels to the public.
The Second Intifada, which began in the fall of 2000, saw some 140 suicide bombings target Israeli buses, restaurants and other civilian areas, before it was suppressed beginning with the IDF’s Operation Defensive Shield in the spring of 2002.
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