The Palestine Hotel (Arabic: فندق فلسطين), often referred to simply as The Palestine, is an 18-story hotel in Baghdad, Iraq located on Firdos Square, across from the Sheraton Ishtar. It has long been favored by journalists and media personnel. The hotel overlooks the Tigris on its eastern bank and is located several hundred metres south of the Baghdad Hotel.
The hotel was built in 1982 by the Iraqi government and managed by the French hotelier Le Méridien as the Palestine Meridien Hotel. UN-imposed sanctions following the Gulf War led Le Méridien to dissociate itself from the hotel, which was subsequently renamed simply the Palestine Hotel. Starting with the 1991 Gulf War and continuing through the 2003 invasion of Iraq, this was one of several hotels Western and other foreign media used to cover situations that developed in Iraq.
Read more about Palestine Hotel: April 8, 2003 Incident, Postwar History, See Also
Famous quotes containing the words palestine and/or hotel:
“I know a lady in Venice would have walked barefoot to Palestine for a touch of his nether lip.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“The talk shows are stuffed full of sufferers who have regained their health—congressmen who suffered through a serious spell of boozing and skirt-chasing, White House aides who were stricken cruelly with overweening ambition, movie stars and baseball players who came down with acute cases of wanting to trash hotel rooms while under the influence of recreational drugs. Most of them have found God, or at least a publisher.”
—Calvin Trillin (b. 1935)