Hamas demanded the judicial prosecution of Israel, after President Shimon Peres implicitly admitted that the late Palestinian President Yasser Arafat was assassinated. "Hamas" spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said in a press statement, Saturday, 12/1/2013, that "Peres' remarks in which he said that the assassination of Arafat was a mistake was the first recognition of the Israeli assassination, which puts an end to the clamor about this issue and holds the occupation responsible for the assassination."The IMEMC makes a similar mistranslation, in English, with the headline "Peres: 'Arafat Should Not Have Been Assassinated'". Naturally, Iran's media does the same thing, as did the Fatah-oriented Al Quds.
Mr Peres said in an interview published in the "New York Times" that "Yasser Arafat should not have been murdered, I think it could have been dealt with, and without it, the situation was more difficult and more complex."
And what did Peres actually say?
The NYT asked him: "You didn’t think that Arafat should be assassinated."
He answered:
No. I thought it was possible to do business with him. Without him, it was much more complicated. With who else could we have closed the Oslo deal? With who else could we have reached the Hebron agreement? On the other hand, I tried to explain to him, for hours on end, a complete educational course: how to be a true leader. We sat together, with me eating from his hand. It took courage. I told him he must be like Lincoln, like Ben-Gurion: one nation, one gun, not innumerable armed forces with each firing in a different direction. At first, Arafat refused, he said, “La, la, la” [Peres does a fairly convincing imitation of Arafat saying “no” in Arabic], but later he said, “O.K.” He lied right to my face, without any problem [regarding promises to fight Palestinian militias and insurgencies].So Peres never even implied that Israel assassinated Arafat; that wording was from the interviewer, not Peres.