Here's a little history on Israel's CONCENTRATION CAMPS for Palestinians, 1948-55

Apollonian

Guest Columnist
On Israel’s little-known concentration and labor camps in 1948-1955

Link: http://alethonews.wordpress.com/201...n-concentration-and-labor-camps-in-1948-1955/


Civilians captured during the fall of Lydda and Ramle around the time of July 12, 1948 and taken to labour camps. In the July heat they were thirsty and were given a drop of water carried by a child under soldiers’ guard. (Photo: Salman Abu Sitta, Palestine Land Society)


By Yazan al-Saadi | Al-Akhbar | September 29, 2014

Much of the grim and murky circumstances of the Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the late 1940s have gradually been exposed over time. One aspect – rarely researched or deeply discussed – is the internment of thousands of Palestinian civilians within at least 22 Zionist-run concentration and labor camps that existed from 1948 to 1955. Now more is known about the contours of this historical crime, due to the comprehensive research by renowned Palestinian historian Salman Abu Sitta and founding member of the Palestinian resource center BADIL Terry Rempel.

The facts are these.

The study – to be published in the upcoming issue of the Journal of Palestine Studies – relies on almost 500 pages of International Committee of the Red Cross’s (ICRC) reports written during the 1948 war, that were declassified and made available to the public in 1996, and accidentally discovered by one of the authors in 1999.

Furthermore, testimonies of 22 former Palestinian civilian detainees of these camps were collected by the authors, through interviews they conducted themselves in 2002, or documented by others during different moments of time.

With these sources of information, the authors, as they put it, pieced together a clearer story of how Israel captured and imprisoned “thousands of Palestinian civilians as forced laborers,” and exploited them “to support its war-time economy.”

Digging up the crimes

“I came across this piece of history in the 1990s when I was collecting material and documents about Palestinians,” Abu Sitta told Al-Akhbar English. “The more and more you dig, the more you find there are crimes that have taken place that are not reported and not known.”

At that time, Abu Sitta went to Geneva for a week to check out the newly-opened archives of the ICRC. According to him, the archives were opened to the public after accusations that the ICRC had sided with the Nazis during World War II. It was an opportunity that he could not miss in terms of seeing what the ICRC had recorded of the events that occurred in Palestine in 1948. It was there he stumbled onto records discussing the existence of five concentration camps run by the Israelis.

He then decided to look for witnesses or former detainees, interviewing Palestinians in occupied Palestine, Syria, and Jordan.

“They all described the same story, and their real experience in these camps,” he said.

One question that immediately struck him was why there were barely any references in history about these camps, especially when it became clearer the more he researched that they existed, and were more than just five camps.

“Many former Palestinian detainees saw the concept of Israel as a vicious enemy, so they thought their experience labouring in these concentration camps was nothing in comparison to the other larger tragedy of the Nakba. The Nakba overshadowed everything,” Abu Sitta explained.“However, when I dug into the period of 1948-1955, I found more references like Mohammed Nimr al-Khatib, who was an imam in Haifa, who had written down interviews with someone from al-Yahya family that was in one of the camps. I was able to trace this man all the way to California and spoke with him in 2002,” he added.

More references were eventually and slowly discovered by Abu Sitta that included information from a Jewish woman called Janoud, a single masters thesis in Hebrew University about the topic, and the personal accounts of economist Yusif Sayigh, helped to further flesh out the scale and nature of these camps.

After more than a decade, Abu Sitta, with his co-author Rempel, are finally presenting their findings to the public.

From burden to opportunity: concentration and labor camps

The establishment of concentration and labor camps occurred after the unilateral declaration of Israel’s statehood on May 1948.

Prior to that event, the number of Palestinian captives in Zionist hands were quite low, because, as the study states, “the Zionist leadership concluded early on that forcible expulsion of the civilian population was the only way to establish a Jewish state in Palestine with a large enough Jewish majority to be ‘viable’.” In other words, for the Zionist strategists, prisoners were a burden in the beginning phases of the ethnic cleansing.

Those calculations changed with the declaration of the Israeli state and the involvement of the armies of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Transjordan, after much of the ethnic cleansing had occurred. From that moment, “the Israeli forces began taking prisoners, both regular Arab soldiers (for eventual exchange), and – selectively – able-bodied Palestinian non-combatant civilians.”

The first camp at Ijlil, which was about 13 km northeast of Jaffa, on the site of the destroyed Palestinian village Ijlil al-Qibiliyya, emptied of its inhabitants in early April. Ijlil was predominately made up of tents, housing hundreds and hundreds of prisoners, categorized as POWs by the Israelis, surrounded by barbed wire fences, watchtowers, and a gate with guards.

As the Israeli conquests grew, in turn exceedingly increasing the number of prisoners, three more camps were established. These are the four “official” camps that the Israelis acknowledged and were actively visited by the ICRC.

The study notes:


All four camps were either on or adjacent to military installations set up by the British during the Mandate. These had been used during World War II for the interment of German, Italian, and other POWs. Two of the camps – Atlit, established in July about 20 kms south of Haifa, and Sarafand, established in September near the depopulated village of Sarafand al-Amar in central Palestine—had earlier been used in the 1930s and 1940s to detain illegal Jewish immigrants.

Atlit was the second largest camp after Ijlil, it had the capacity of holding up to 2,900 prisoners, while Sarafand had the maximum capacity of 1,800, and Tel Letwinksy, near Tel Aviv, held more than 1,000.

All four camps were administered by “former British officers who had defected their ranks when British forces withdrew from Palestine in mid-May 1948,” and the camp’s guards and administrative staff were former members of the Irgun and the Stern Gang – both groups designated as terrorist organizations by the British before their departure. In total, the four “official” camps were staffed by 973 soldiers.

A fifth camp, called Umm Khalid, was established at a site of another depopulated village near the Zionist settlement of Netanya, and was even assigned an official number in the records, but never attained “official” status. It had the capacity to hold 1,500 prisoners. Unlike the other four camps, Umm Khalid would be “the fist camp established exclusively as a labor camp” and was “the first of the “recognized” camps to be shut down… by the end of 1948.”

Complementing these five “recognized” camps, were at least 17 other “unrecognized camps” that were not mentioned in official sources, but the authors discovered through multiple prisoner testimonies.



Civilians in a labour camp in Ramleh, July 1948. (Photo: Salman Abu Sitta, Palestine Land Society)

“Many of [these camps],” the authors noted, “[were] apparently improvised or ad hoc, often consisting of no more than a police station, a school, or the house of a village notable,” with holding capacities that ranged from almost 200 prisoners to tens.

Most of the camps, official and unofficial, were situated within the borders of the UN-proposed Jewish state, “although at least four [unofficial camps] – Beersheba, Julis, Bayt Daras, and Bayt Nabala – were in the UN-assigned Arab state and one was inside the Jerusalem “corpus separatum.”

“[T]he situation of civilian internees was ‘absolutely confused’ with that of POWs, and… Jewish authorities ‘treated all Arabs between the ages of 16 and 55 as combatants and locked them up as prisoners of war.’” – ICRC report, 1948

The number of Palestinian non-combatant detainees “far exceeded” those of Arab soldiers in regular armies or bona fide POWs. Citing a July 1948 monthly report made by ICRC mission head Jacques de Reynier, the study states that de Reynier noted, “that the situation of civilian internees was ‘absolutely confused’ with that of POWs, and that the Jewish authorities ‘treated all Arabs between the ages of 16 and 55 as combatants and locked them up as prisoners of war.’” In addition, the ICRC found among the detainees in official camps, that 90 of the prisoners were elderly men, and 77 were boys, aged 15 years or younger. The study highlights the statements by an ICRC delegate Emile Moeri in January 1949 of the camp inmates:


It is painful to see these poor people, especially old, who were snatched from their villages and put without reason in a camp, obliged to pass the winter under wet tents, away from their families; those who could not survive these conditions died. Little children (10-12 years) are equally found under these conditions. Similarly sick people, some with tuberculosis, languish in these camps under conditions which, while fine for healthy individuals, will certainly lead to their death if we do not find a solution to this problem. For a long time we have demanded that the Jewish authorities release those civilians who are sick and need treatment to the care of their families or to an Arab hospital, but we have not received a response.

As the report noted, “there are no precise figures on the total number of Palestinian civilians held by Israel during the 1948-49 war” and estimates tend to not account for “unofficial” camps, in addition to the frequent movement of prisoners between the camps in use. In the four “official” camps, the number of Palestinian prisoners never exceeded 5,000 according to figures in Israeli records.

Taking account of the capacity of Umm Khalid, and estimates of the “unofficial camps,” the final number of Palestinian prisoners could be around the 7,000 range, and perhaps much more when, as the study states, taking into account a November 17, 1948 diary entry by David Ben-Gurion, one of the main Zionist leaders and Israel’s first prime minister, who mentioned “the existence of 9,000 POWs in Israeli-run camps.”

In general, the living conditions in the “official” camps were far below what would be considered appropriate by international law at that time. Moeri, who visited the camps constantly, reported that in Ijlil in November 1948:

“[m]any [of the] tents are torn, that the camp was “not ready for winter,” the latrines not covered, and the canteen not working for two weeks. Referring to an apparently ongoing situation, he stated that “the fruits are still defective, the meat is of poor quality, [and] the vegetables are in short supply.”

Furthermore, Moeri reported that he saw for himself, “the wounds left by the abuse” of the previous week, when the guards had fired on the prisoners, wounding one, and had beaten another.”

As the study shows, the civilian status of the majority of the detainees were clear for the ICRC delegates in the country, who reported that the men captured “had undoubtedly never been in a regular army.” Detainees who were combatants, the study explains, were “routinely shot on the pretense that they had been attempting to escape.”

The Israeli forces seemed to always target able-bodied men, leaving behind women, children, and the elderly – when not massacring them – the policy continued even after there were low levels of military confrontation. All in all, as the Israeli records show and the study cites, “Palestinian civilians comprised the vast majority (82 percent) of the 5,950 listed as internees in the POW camps, while the Palestinians alone (civilian plus military) comprised 85 percent.”

The wide-scale kidnapping and imprisonment of Palestinian civilians tend to correspond with the Israeli military campaigns. For example, one of the first major roundups occurred during Operation Danj, when 60-70,000 Palestinians were expelled from the central towns of Lydda and Ramleh. At the same time, between a fifth and a quarter of the male population from these two towns who were over the age of 15 were sent to the camps.

The largest round-up of civilians came from villages of central Galilee who were captured during Operation Hiram in the fall of 1948.

One Palestinian survivor, Moussa, described to the authors what he witnessed at the time.

“They took us from all villages around us: al-Bi’na, Deir al-Asad, Nahaf, al-Rama, and Eilabun. They took 4 young men and shot them dead… They drove us on foot. It was hot. We were not allowed to drink. They took us to [the Palestinian Druze village] al-Maghar, then [to the Jewish settlement] Nahalal, then to Atlit.”

A November 16, 1948 UN report collaborated Moussa’s account, stating that some 500 Palestinian men “were taken by force march and vehicle to a Jewish concentration camp at Nahlal.”

Maintaining Israel’s economy with “slave labor”

The policy of targeting civilians, particular “able-bodied” men, was not accidental according to the study. It states, “with tens of thousands of Jewish men and women called up for military service, Palestinian civilian internees constituted an important supplement to the Jewish civilian labor employed under emergency legislation in maintaining the Israeli economy,” which even the ICRC delegation had noted in their reports.

The prisoners were forced to do public and military work, such as draining wetlands, working as servants, collecting and transporting looted refugee property, moving stones from demolished Palestinian homes, paving roads, digging military trenches, burying the dead, and much more. As one former Palestinian detainee named Habib Mohammed Ali Jarada described in the study, “At gunpoint, I was made to work all day. At night, we slept in tents. In winter, water was seeping below our bedding, which was dry leaves, cartons and wooden pieces.”

Another prisoner in Umm Khalied, Marwan Iqab al-Yehiya said in an interview with the authors, “We had to cut and carry stones all day [in a quarry]. Our daily food was only one potato in the morning and half dried fish at night. They beat anyone who disobeyed orders.” This labor was interspersed with acts of humiliation by the Israeli guards, with Yehiya speaking of prisoners being “lined up and ordered to strip naked as a punishment for the escape of two prisoners at night.”

“[Jewish] Adults and children came from nearby kibbutz to watch us line up naked and laugh. To us this was most degrading,” he added.

Abuses by the Israeli guards were systematic and rife in the camps, the brunt of which was directed toward villagers, farmers, and lower class Palestinians. This was so, the study said, because educated prisoners “knew their rights and had the confidence to argue with and stand up to their captors.”

What is also interestingly noted by the study is how ideological affiliations between prisoners and their guards, had another effect in terms of the relationship between them. The study, cites the testimony of Kamal Ghattas, who was captured during the Israeli attack in the Galilee, who said:


We had a fight with our jailers. Four hundred of us confronted 100 soldiers. They brought reinforcements. Three of my friends and I were taken to a cell. They threatened to shoot us. All night we sang the Communist Anthem. They took the four of us to Umm Khaled camp. The Israelis were afraid of their image in Europe. Our contact with our Central Committee and Mapam [Socialist Israeli party] saved us .… I met a Russian officer and told him they took us from our homes although we were non-combatants which was against the Geneva Conventions. When he knew I was a Communist he embraced me and said, “Comrade, I have two brothers in the Red Army. Long live Stalin. Long Live Mother Russia”.

Yet, the less fortunate Palestinians faced acts of violence which included arbitrary executions and torture, with no recourse. The executions were always defended as stopping “escape attempts” – real or claimed by the guards.

It became so common that one former Palestinian detainee of Tel Litwinsky, Tewfic Ahmed Jum’a Ghanim recounted, “Anyone who refused to work was shot. They said [the person] tried to escape. Those of us who thought [we] were going to be killed walked backward facing the guards.”

Ultimately, by the end of 1949, Palestinian prisoners were gradually released after heavy lobbying by the ICRC, and other organizations, but was limited in scale and very focused to specific cases. Prisoners of Arab armies were released in prisoner exchanges, but Palestinian prisoners were unilaterally expelled across the armistice line without any food, supplies, or shelter, and told to walk into the distance, never to return.

It would not be until 1955 that most of the Palestinian civilian prisoners would finally be released.



Forced Labour Camps Atlas. (Source: Salman Abu Sitta, Palestine Land Society)

An enduring crime

The importance of this study is multi-faceted. Not only does it reveal the numerous violations of international law and conventions of the age, such as 1907 Hague Regulations and the 1929 Geneva Conventions, but also shows how the event shaped the ICRC in the long run.

Because the ICRC was faced with an Israeli belligerent actor who was unwilling to listen and conform to international law and conventions, the ICRC itself had to adapt in what it considered were practical ways to help ensure the Palestinian civilian prisoners were protected under the barest of rights.

Citing his final report, the study quotes de Reynier:


[The ICRC] protested on numerous occasions affirming the right of these civilians to enjoy their freedom unless found guilty and judged by a court. But we have tacitly accepted their POW status because in this way they would enjoy the rights conferred upon them by the Convention. Otherwise, if they were not in the camps they would be expelled [to an Arab country] and in one way or another, they would lead, without resources, the miserable life of refugees.

In the end, the ICRC, and other organizations, were simply ineffective as Israel ignored its condemnations with impunity, in addition to the diplomatic cover of major Western powers.

More importantly, the study sheds more light on the extent of the Israeli crimes during its brutal and bloody birth. And “much more remains to be told,” as the final line of the study states.

“It is amazing to me, and many Europeans, who have seen my evidence,” Abu Sitta said, “that a forced labor camp was opened in Palestine three years after they were closed in Germany, and were run by former prisoners – there were German Jewish guards.”

“This is a bad reflection of the human spirit, where the oppressed copies an oppressor against innocent lives,” he added. The study essentially shows the foundations and beginnings of Israeli policy towards Palestinian civilians that comes in the form of kidnapping, arrest, and detainment. This criminality continues till this day. One merely has to read the reports on the hundreds of Palestinians arrested prior, during, and after Israel’s latest war on Gaza mid-summer of this year.

“Gaza today is a concentration camp, no different than the past,” Abu Sitta concluded to Al-Akhbar English.

Yazan is a staff writer for Al-Akhbar English. Follow him on Twitter: @WhySadeye


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Link: https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/report-perpetual-israeli-occupation-root-violence-85233731

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GENEVA -- Investigators commissioned by the U.N.’s top human rights body say tensions between Palestinians and Israelis are underpinned by Israel's “perpetual occupation” of Palestinian areas with no apparent intention of ending it.

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For decades the use of banned biological weapons during the Nakba was kept hidden in Israel’s archives. Recent discoveries have shed light not only on this Zionist war crime, but also the sinister motive behind it

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In September, a highly revealing academic paper was published exposing the details of a previously hidden operation by Zionist militias during the 1948 Nakba (or “Catastrophe”), in which chemical and biological weapons were used to poison Palestinians, intervening Arab armies, and the citizens of neighboring states with typhoid, dysentery, malaria, and other diseases.
Working by stealth, Zionist militants poured vast quantities of infectious bacteria into wells and aqueducts providing villages, towns, and cities with water, in direct violation of the 1925 Geneva Protocol, which strictly prohibits “the use of bacteriological methods of warfare.”
The local epidemics created by this man-made disaster greatly assisted the forcible conquest of Palestinian territory by armed Jewish militias with their capture made permanent, while hindering the progress of advancing Arab armies.

Biological warfare and the founding of Israel
The 1948 War has been well-studied, and its impact, chiefly the permanent displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the Nakba still reverberates today. Yet, understanding of the conflict has hitherto been incomplete.
Aside from opaque references to the biological warfare campaign in the diaries and autobiographies of Zionist leaders and militants from that era, and a 2003 academic article, the use of these illegal substances has never previously been revealed.
In an ironic twist of fate, the Zionist biological blitzkrieg was suppressed so successfully that numerous highly incriminating documents referring to the operation’s name – “Cast Thy Bread,” a Biblical quote from Ecclesiastes 11:1, in which Jews are directed to “cast thy bread upon the waters, for after many days you will find it again” – slipped past government censors unexpurgated.
Evidently, even they were unaware of this war crime which followed the chemical extermination of millions of Jews, which says a lot.
It turned out that this gap in the historical record was both created and maintained intentionally. As the paper notes, a reference was made in the diaries of Israel’s first prime minister David Ben-Gurion two days before war broke out on 15 May, 1948 to a Zionist militant recently spending several thousand dollars on “biological materials.” However, this was censored by the Defense Ministry Press when the volumes were published in 1982.
‘Serious and potent use’
That cover-up continues to the present day, even in the paper itself. The authors – Benny Morris of Ben-Gurion University and Benjamin Z. Kedar of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem – seem at pains to diminish the significance of “Cast Thy Bread,” pointing to the relatively few casualties produced by the effort as a sign of its “ineffectiveness.”
Such analysis discounts an obvious alternative interpretation, namely, that the relatively low death toll was in fact intended. This was due to the long-held Zionist objective of seizing land reserved for Arabs under the UN’s 1947 partition plan – under which Mandatory Palestine would be split in half between separate Arab and Jewish states – and portions of neighboring Arab countries, without mass slaughter, and thus plausibly denied.
Reinforcing this theory, the paper reveals that the water supplies of several Arab villages, towns, and cities were targeted by Zionist militants even before the war, and that biological warfare was seen by Zionist militants at the time to have been pivotal in the permanent capture of Palestinian land and expulsion of local residents.
Take for instance the Zionist poisoning of a vital aqueduct in Kabri, a primary source of water for nearby Palestinian settlements, which the paper’s authors call “the most serious and potent use” of biological weapons during the 1948 War, despite it taking place before the conflict formally began.
Manufacturing epidemics and displacement
The historic northern city of Acre, which the UN designated part of a future Arab state, depended heavily on the aqueduct for water. The morale of its inhabitants is said by Morris and Kedar to have been “already shaky” when local supplies were poisoned, due to recent Zionist conquest of nearby Haifa, the region’s capital.
That fall of the city led to much of its population fleeing and taking up residence in Acre, which was cut off from other key regional centers and neighboring Lebanon. This, combined with the impending withdrawal of the British – who were supposed to be defending Arabs from Zionist attack – led to “plummeting” spirits among civilians. The outbreak of a typhus epidemic reduced them to “a state of extreme distress,” the city’s mayor was quoted as saying on 3 May that year.
Fast forward to 13 days later, when Zionist forces attacked the city, issuing a brutal ultimatum unless Acre’s inhabitants capitulated without resistance: “we will destroy you to the last man and utterly.” Hours later, local leaders surrendered, leading to three quarters of Acre’s Arab population – 13,510 civilians – being displaced forever.
The following month, a Zionist militant intelligence report concluded that artificially unleashing the epidemic in advance had contributed significantly to Acre’s hasty collapse. The same review found that outbreaks of typhus and “panic induced by rumors of the spread of the disease” alike were similarly “an exacerbating factor in the evacuation” of several Palestinian areas.
On top of ensuring a low death rate then, biological weapons also made the mass purge of Palestinians appear self-initiated.
Targeting other Arabs
On 26 September, Zionist operatives began a wide-ranging campaign of “harassment by all means” against soldiers and civilians across Palestine and on the soil of Arab countries involved in the 1948 War. Expelling the occupants of territory earmarked for Jews by the UN, seizing the West Bank, and ensuring displaced refugees didn’t return home, were all objectives of the Zionist project.
Zionist militants had for some time been targeting Arab soldiers directly with biological weapons. In late May that year, Egypt’s foreign minister sent a cable to the UN secretary general announcing the recent arrest of two “Zionist agents who admitted that they had been instructed to contaminate the springs from which the Egyptian troops at Gaza draw their water supply.”
The pair acknowledged having dropped typhoid and dysentery germs into nearby wells, and were found to be in possession of “several bottles containing a liquid which was discovered to contain the germs of dysentery and typhoid,” as well as a “canteen containing a liquid with a high concentration of typhoid and dysentery germs.”
Such high-level exposure did nothing to deter the execution of “Cast Thy Bread.” In fact, further undermining the whitewashed narrative of Morris and Kedar, the targeting of neighboring Arab states continued until the final stages of the war, when Zionist victory was all but inevitable.
In the case of Lebanon, even before the campaign of “harassment by all means” commenced, Zionist agents in Beirut were scouting possible targets for sabotage operations in Lebanon, including “bridges, railway tracks, water and electricity sources.” They were eager to cast the net further afield of “Cast Thy Bread.”
As late as January 1949, two months before the country signed an armistice with the Zionists, militants were tasked with investigating “water sources [and] central reservoirs” in Beirut, and “supplying maps of water pipelines” in major Lebanese and Syrian towns.
After the 1948 War ended, the informal Zionist biological warfare unit became the Institute for Biological Research in Ness Ziona, central Israel. Its first director was Alexander Keynan, a former militant who was intimately involved in the planning and execution of “Cast Thy Bread.” Clearly, his sterling work made him leading candidate for research into future offensive biological warfare strategies.
Warning from history?
Quite where Keynan’s investigations led, and the scale of modern Israel’s biological and chemical arsenal today, isn’t certain – although the country is one of just 13 out of 184 UN-recognized territories that is not a signatory to the 1975 Biological Weapons Convention, and one of just four states not to be party to the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention.
Ominously, this may suggest that Israel’s research in the field remains ongoing. It may also serve as another rationale for keeping such a tight lid on “Cast Thy Bread” as the notorious operation still has relevance to the present, which Israeli authorities wish to keep secret.
In November 1998, Britain’s Sunday Times citing Israeli military and western intelligence sources reported that Tel Aviv was “working on a biological weapon that would harm Arabs but not Jews,” by “targeting victims by ethnic origin.”
“In developing their ‘ethno-bomb’, Israeli scientists are trying to exploit medical advances by identifying distinctive genes carried by some Arabs, then create a genetically modified bacterium or virus,” the newspaper alleged.
“The intention is to use the ability of viruses and certain bacteria to alter the DNA inside their host’s living cells. The scientists are trying to engineer deadly micro-organisms that attack only those bearing the distinctive genes.”
The program was said to be based is based at a “biological institute” in Ness Iona, home to the Institute for Biological Research. A scientist at the site was quoted as saying his peers had “succeeded in pinpointing a particular characteristic in the genetic profile of certain Arab communities, particularly the Iraqi people,” and that “the disease could be spread by spraying the organisms into the air or putting them in water supplies.”
Critics denounced the Times report at the time as a “blood libel,” referencing the fabricated, anti-Semitic myth that Jews murder young Christian boys in order to use their blood in religious rituals.
It is fitting then, that when on 27 May, 1948, Syria’s representative to the UN read out the Egyptian cable sent to the body’s secretary general on the capture of “Zionist agents” attempting to poison Egyptian troops in Gaza, his Jewish Agency counterpart charged that Cairo and Damascus had “chosen to associate themselves with the most depraved tradition of medieval anti-Semitic incitement – the charge that Jews had poisoned Christian wells.”
According to The Palestine Chronicle, the recent unearthed documents are one of many historic war crimes committed against the Palestinian people by the then-emerging occupation state, yet much of the Nakba’s history remains classified and is slowly resurfacing.
 
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