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Palestinian prime minister hospitalized

Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad was briefly hospitalized Monday with stomach problems but did not suffer another heart attack, a close friend of his told The Cable. "He had some stomach problems, he was in the hospital for a half an hour. He did not have a heart attack," Ziad Asali, President of the American ...

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Getty Images
Getty Images

Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad was briefly hospitalized Monday with stomach problems but did not suffer another heart attack, a close friend of his told The Cable.

"He had some stomach problems, he was in the hospital for a half an hour. He did not have a heart attack," Ziad Asali, President of the American Task Force for Palestine, said in a short phone interview.

Asali spoke with Fayyad directly Monday and said that rumors to the effect that Fayyad had suffered a heart attack were not true. Fayyad did suffer a heart attack during a May 2011 trip to see his son graduate from the University of Texas at Austin.

"He’s had some problems with his stomach before," Asali said. "I have been told by him that he did not have a heart attack and he is home already."

Fayyad is reported to be in a power struggle with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. President Barack Obama praised both Abbas and Fayyad as "true partners" for peace in his visit to Israel and the West Bank last month.

Josh Rogin covers national security and foreign policy and writes the daily Web column The Cable. His column appears bi-weekly in the print edition of The Washington Post. He can be reached for comments or tips at josh.rogin@foreignpolicy.com.

Previously, Josh covered defense and foreign policy as a staff writer for Congressional Quarterly, writing extensively on Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, U.S.-Asia relations, defense budgeting and appropriations, and the defense lobbying and contracting industries. Prior to that, he covered military modernization, cyber warfare, space, and missile defense for Federal Computer Week Magazine. He has also served as Pentagon Staff Reporter for the Asahi Shimbun, Japan's leading daily newspaper, in its Washington, D.C., bureau, where he reported on U.S.-Japan relations, Chinese military modernization, the North Korean nuclear crisis, and more.

A graduate of George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs, Josh lived in Yokohama, Japan, and studied at Tokyo's Sophia University. He speaks conversational Japanese and has reported from the region. He has also worked at the House International Relations Committee, the Embassy of Japan, and the Brookings Institution.

Josh's reporting has been featured on CNN, MSNBC, C-Span, CBS, ABC, NPR, WTOP, and several other outlets. He was a 2008-2009 National Press Foundation's Paul Miller Washington Reporting Fellow, 2009 military reporting fellow with the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism and the 2011 recipient of the InterAction Award for Excellence in International Reporting. He hails from Philadelphia and lives in Washington, D.C. Twitter: @joshrogin

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