NEW YORK- A senior official of Yasir Arafat’s Palestine National Council has admitted that despite Arafat’s promises, the PLO National Covenant has never been changed.

The 1993 Oslo accords required Arafat to remove from the Covenant all clauses calling for violence or the destruction of Israel. Thirty of the 33 clauses would have to be deleted to meet that requirement. In April 1996, Arafat’s Palestine National Council (PNC) —the only body legally empowered to change the Covenant— passed a resolution appointing a legal committee to consider changes; but the committee never met. On December 14, 1998, Arafat and President Bill Clinton presided over a meeting in Gaza of Palestinian Arab notables raised their hands to signal approval of a statement by Arafat saying the Covenant had already been changed.

But a top PNC official has now admitted that, in fact, no new version of the Covenant was ever issued. Zuhair Sanduka, the PNC’s Director of International Parliamentary Affairs, told the Israeli news agency IMRA on January 23, 2002: “No other Charter [Covenant] has indeed been written since [1998]…There are publications that refer to the decision to make the amendments. But there are no other texts—no other paragraphs or articles in place of those articles that had to be canceled or amended. But there is the reference that there are articles that should be either canceled, modified, or amended.”

Morton A. Klein, National President of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), said: “This is proof, once again, that Arafat has created an entire culture of lies. He says he has arrested terrorists; then it turns out the terrorists are walking free. He says the PA had nothing to do with the ‘ship of terror’ and its fifty-plus tons of weapons; then it turns out the ship was owned and sponsored by the PA; he says the Holocaust was a hoax; he says Israel injects Arabs with AIDS; he says Israel carries out terrorist attacks against its own citizens so it can blame the Arabs. He also claims the PLO Covenant was changed—and now we have irrefutable evidence from one of his own men that he has been lying about that, too.”