THE old lady comes to the grave at midnight, when there are just two Palestinian guards standing by the heap of flowers covering Yasser Arafat’s tomb.

They know her as Um Abed, a widow from a nearby village. She used to visit Abu Ammar, as local people called the Palestinian leader, from time to time in his battered headquarters in the West Bank town of Ramallah. He would give her a little pocket money and help her to survive. Now she is alone and embittered.

Dressed in traditional black, her hair covered with a white shawl, she cries: “To hell with those who betrayed you, Abu Ammar! A curse on the murderers and their collaborators!” Um Abed does not need proof that the 75-year-old Arafat was murdered. She just knows; and while it would be easy to dismiss her views as the ravings of an old woman, her sentiments are shared by many Palestinian leaders.

Nasser al-Kidwa, Arafat’s nephew, is the urbane and sophisticated Palestinian ambassador to the United Nations. He was at the Paris hospital where his uncle died and last week came away with a 558-page French medical report into Arafat’s condition. As a commission of Palestinian doctors pores over its contents, al-Kidwa has already reached his own conclusion.

“He died of unnatural causes,” he said in the UN delegates’ lounge in New York last week. “If you insist on putting a grade on it, I would say there was a six out of 10 probability he was murdered.”

Why, al-Kidwa wondered, were the Israeli officials evidently so confident that Arafat’s illness was terminal when he left the West Bank for the last time after waving to supporters at the doorway to his helicopter?

Could the Israelis have plotted to kill him before the controversial withdrawal from Gaza devised by Ariel Sharon, the prime minister? Were they planning to divide and rule over a new generation of potentially feuding Palestinian leaders?

Al-Kidwa is adamant the truth will out. “This is the Middle East. The facts will leak out at some point in the future,” he said. “You can’t hide the news about President Arafat.”

Ashraf al-Kurdi, Arafat’s doctor for 20 years, believes suspicions are so entrenched that the Palestinian leader’s body should be exhumed.

“It could be that he was poisoned. I was the last doctor who saw him alive and conscious before he flew to Paris and I’m calling for an investigation and autopsy.”

Conspiracy theories are rife in the Middle East, where many take it for granted that Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, organised the September 11 terrorist attacks and warned Jews in the World Trade Center not to turn up for work that day.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an early 20th-century anti-semitic forgery, are regarded by many Arabs as a true guide to Jewish plans to rule the world. The “blood libel” that Jews ritually murder children for unleavened Passover bread is readily repeated.

The West is by no means immune to such speculation: to this day theories abound that Diana, Princess Diana of Wales was murdered. Propaganda of a different kind about Arafat’s death has been disseminated in the West, where some have claimed he was suffering from Aids contracted during homosexual romps with his bodyguards.

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