The death of Yasir Arafat has been suffused with mystery. While he was still alive but quite ill in his besieged Ramallah bunker, one could hardly keep track of the doctors attending to his care. There was his own personal physician, there were other Palestinian MDs, a medical team that came from Jordan, and another cohort of doctors from several Arab countries that arrived to examine and treat him--almost an international conference, as it were. Then he was sent off to Paris, where he was greeted as a visiting potentate and where he died. In the interim, his wife, Suha, and attending officials of the Palestinian Authority (PA) fought over his body until he gasped his last breath. Of course, they were also fighting over the billions he had pilfered from the Palestinian people. But that's another matter that has not been settled.

When he died, Mrs. Arafat denied the authorities the right to perform an autopsy on his corpse. The PA initiated a probe into the circumstances of his demise, an investigation that has apparently never been completed or whose completion has never been reported. The French medical records, whose contents were reported by The New York Times and Haaretz last month, were curiously inconclusive.

The closest to a definitive judgment came from the man we once would have called his general practitioner. He noted that Arafat was still breathing and actually walked to his helicopter in Ramallah. Shortly after he was admitted to a French military hospital, the doctor observed, Arafat was dead. Perhaps President Jacques Chirac was involved in some deadly intrigue. There were other rumors, some emanating from people quite intimate with the rais. He had died of aids, of colitis, of poisoning, or perhaps all of these together and a few more diseases on the side.

Amid this diagnostic confusion, the Palestinian parliament has decided to bring some clarity to the matter. It has designated a panel of legislators to probe who and what killed Arafat. One half of this query seems to be rather simple. "We believe," Hassan Kreisheh, the parliament's deputy speaker, told the Associated Press, that "he was killed" by the Israelis. Maybe they also used his blood to make Passover wine.