Greenway Errs on Arafat’s Death
Well wishers gather at a makeshift shrine outside the Percy Military Hospital, where Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat is receiving treatment, in Clamart November 10, 2004. French military doctor and hospital spokesman General Christian Estripeau announced the death of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat in Clamart, near Paris, early morning Nov. 11, 2004. (ALIX WILLIAM/SIPA/Newscom)
H.D.S. Greenway, whose column appears regularly in the Boston Globe, erred last week, wrongly stating in his Sept. 7 column (“Obama’s Mideast Quicksand”) that “. . . . Arafat finally died, holed up in a bunker under Israeli siege.”
Yasser Arafat died in a French military hospital, not in a bunker, and not under Israeli siege. As the Nov. 12, 2004 Boston Globe obituary for Arafat began:
Yasser Arafat expired politically long before he was declared dead yesterday morning in a hospital outside Paris.
A more detailed article the day earlier, by Charles Sennott and Charles Radin, opened:
PARIS — Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat died early today at a French military hospital where he had been in a coma lingering between life and death for the last week.
The Greenway column also appeared Sept. 8 in the International Herald Tribune. Stay tuned for corrections. . . .
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