Twenty-one years after the passing of Yasser Arafat in a Paris military hospital, the mystery surrounding the Palestinian leader’s death remains unresolved, a silence that continues to echo through a people still searching for truth and self-determination. Arafat’s death in November 2004 was officially attributed to a sudden illness, yet the circumstances that led to his rapid decline remain the subject of suspicion, disbelief, and enduring grief.

Arafat’s name is inseparable from the modern Palestinian struggle. For decades, he embodied the cause of a nation under occupation, a symbol of unity amid division, resilience amid despair. From his early years as a student activist to his role in founding Fatah and later leading the Palestine Liberation Organization, Arafat stood at the centre of a movement that demanded recognition of a people’s right to exist freely on their own land. His historic address to the United Nations in 1974,  bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun, captured the impossible duality of his mission: peace and resistance intertwined.

When he returned to the homeland in the 1990s, after the signing of the Oslo Accords, Arafat’s leadership marked both a moment of cautious hope and the beginning of new political struggles. The later years of his life were overshadowed by isolation in Ramallah, where he was besieged for months within his own compound. Those close to him recall a man who remained defiant yet increasingly frail, cut off from his people but unbroken in spirit. His death, following years of confinement, only deepened the sense of injustice, a leader of liberation laid to rest far from Jerusalem, denied the right to be buried in the city he had long called the heart of Palestine.

Arafat’s absence left a void no successor has been able to fill. For many, his image remains a moral compass in an age when occupation deepens, settlements spread, and the promise of statehood fades. The unanswered questions surrounding his death symbolise a broader truth: the story of a people whose fate has long been written by others, yet who continue to resist erasure.