|
Back
to Studies page
* Dr Salman Abu-Sitta is a Palestinian
resident in Kuwait. An engineer by profession, he served for more
than twenty years on the Palestinian National Council. He has
several books published on the topic of refugees and lectures
extensively on the topic. He is also the president of Palestine Land
Society, London.
At a time when
TV screens were filled with images of perceived weapons of mass
destruction (WMD) in Iraq among people on the verge of starvation,
the West turned a blind eye to the first biological terrorist in
the Middle East,
Israel, where
the largest depot of WMD between London and Peking is located.
When
confronted with the anomaly, the United States ambassador to the UN,
John Negroponti, responds with typical cynicism, “Israel did not use
these weapons against its people or its neighbours.” Assuming that
the ambassador is well informed, this statement is a patent lie.
Israel used biological weapons even before it was created on Arab
soil in 1948 and ever since. The purpose, according to Ben Gurion,
is genocide, and if not complete, the purpose is not to allow the
dispossessed Palestinians to return to their homes.
Poisoning
Acre Water Supply
In the wake of
Haifa’s occupation on 23 April 1948 by the Zionists, under the nose
of the British Mandate forces commended by General Stockwell, a man
still historically discredited for this failure, thousands converged
on Acre, a nearby city, which was still Arab under the “protection”
of the British forces.
The Zionists
besieged the city from the landside, and started showering the
population with a hail of mortar bombs day and night. Famous for its
historical walls, Acre could stand the siege for a long time. The
city water supply comes from a nearby village, Kabri, about 10kms to
the north, through an aqueduct. The Zionists injected typhoid in the
aqueduct at some intermediate point, which passes through Zionist
settlements.
The story can
now be told, thanks to the International Committee of the Red Cross
(ICRC) files, which have now become available, 50 years after the
event. A series of reports, under the reference G59/1/ GC, G3/82,
sent by ICRC delegate de Meuron from 6 May to about 19 May 1948
describe the conditions of the city population, struck by a sudden
typhoid epidemic, and the efforts to combat it.
Of particular
importance are the minutes of an emergency conference held at the
Lebanese Red Cross Hospital in Acre on 6 May, to deal with the
typhoid epidemic. The meeting was attended by: Brigadier Beveridge,
Chief of British Medical Services and Colonel Bonnet of the British
Army, Dr Maclean of the Medical Services, Mr de Meuron, ICRC
delegate in addition to other officials of the city. The minutes
stated that there are at least 70 known civilian casualties; others
may not have been reported. It was determined that the infection is
“water borne” and not due to crowded or unhygienic conditions as
claimed by the Israelis. It was decided that a substitute water
supply should now come from artesian wells or from the agricultural
station, just north of Acre (see map), not from the aqueduct. Water
chlorine solution was applied, inoculation of civil population
started, movement of civil population was controlled (lest refugees
heading north towards Lebanon carried the typhoid epidemic with
them, as intended by the Zionists).
In his other
reports, de Meuron mentioned 55 casualties among British soldiers,
who were spirited away to Port Said in Egypt for hospitalisation.
General Stockwell arranged for de Meuron to fly on a military plane
to Jerusalem to fetch medicine. The British, who left Palestine in
the hands of the Jews, did not want another embarrassing incident to
delay their departure.
Brigadier
Beveridge told de Meuron, “this is the first time this has happened
in Palestine”. This belies the Israeli story that the epidemic is
due to “unhygienic conditions”. If that was so, how come there were
an almost equal number of casualties among British soldiers and
no epidemic broke-out in such other concentrations of refugees,
under far worse conditions, in
Jaffa, Lydda,
Nazareth and Gaza?
The city of
Acre, now burdened by the epidemic, fell easy prey to the Zionists.
They intensified their bombardment. Trucks carrying loudspeakers
proclaimed, “Surrender or commit suicide. We will destroy you to the
last man.” That was not a figure of speech. Palumbo, in The
Palestinian Catastrophe, notes the “typical” case of Mohamed Fayez
Soufi. Soufi with friends went to get food from their homes in a new
Acre suburb. They were caught by Zionist soldiers and forced at
gunpoint to drink cyanide. Soufi faked swallowing the poison. The
others were not so lucky; they died within half an hour.
Lieutenant
Petite, a French UN observer, reported that looting was being
conducted in a systematic manner by the army, carrying off
furniture, clothes and anything useful for the new Jewish immigrants
and also part of “a Jewish plan to prevent the return of the
refugees.” Lieutenant Petite also reported that the Jews had
murdered 100 Arab civilians in Acre, particularly those who refused
to leave.
This episode,
which started with poisoning Acre water supply and ended with the
collapse of the city, the depopulation of its inhabitants, and its
occupation by the Jews, whetted their appetite to try this crime
again.
Poisoning
Gaza:
Two weeks
later, after their “success” in Acre, the Zionists struck again.
This time in Gaza, where hundreds of thousands of refugees had
gathered after their villages in southern Palestine were occupied.
The end however was different.
The following
cable was sent from the commander of the Egyptian Forces in
Palestine to General Headquarters in Cairo:
“15.20 hrs,
24 May [1948] Our Intelligence forces captured two Jews, David
Horeen and David Mizrahi. They were interrogated and confessed they
had been sent by Officer Moshe to poison the army [and the peoples’]
water supply. They carried with them water bottles divided in the
middle. The top part has water and the bottom part has a liquid
contaminated with typhoid and dysentery, equipped with a rear
opening from which the liquid can be released. They confessed they
were members of a 20-strong team sent from Rehovot for the same
purpose. Both have written their confession in Hebrew and signed it.
We have taken the necessary medical precautions.”
In Ben
Gurion’s War Diary, the following entry is found on 27 May 1948:
“[Chief of
Staff Yigel Yadin] picked up a cable from Gaza saying they captured
Jews carrying malaria germs and gave instructions not to drink
water”.
This is
typical of Ben Gurion’s oblique writing of history. He was fully
aware of the weight of history when such crimes are discovered.
Nuremberg trials were held only three years before. More on the
background of this cable was given in Yeruham Cohen’s book, In
Daylight and Night Darkness, Tel Aviv, 1969, pp66-68 (in Hebrew).
On 22 July
1948, the [Palestinian] Higher Arab Committee (AHC) submitted a 13-
page report to the United Nations accusing the Jews of using
“inhuman” weapons and waging a genocide war against the Arabs
through the use of bacteria and germs, developed in specially built
laboratories. The report also accuses the Jews (the word Israel was
not used) of spreading cholera in Egypt and Syria in 1947/48. The
story was picked up by the award-winning journalist, Thomas J
Hamilton of the New York Times and published on 24 July 1948.
Cholera in
Egypt and Syria
The summer of
1947 was hot with diplomatic activity. The United Nations Special
Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) was busy touring Palestine and Arab
countries in order to propose the partition of Palestine such that
the new Jewish immigrants to Palestine, who controlled only seven
per cent of Palestine under the British Mandate, be given a big
chunk of Palestine (turned out to be 54 per cent) in order to
establish a foreign state in the midst of Arab land.
The Arabs,
still under the tutelage of Britain, were debating how to resist the
Western-supported scheme to take away their land. The forces to
reckon with were neighbouring countries with common borders with
Palestine. Lebanon was weak. Trans-Jordan was still controlled
directly by the British and King Abdullah was conciliatory to the
Jews. This left Egypt, the stronger Arab country and Syria, recently
freed from the clutches of the French Mandate. Syria was the centre
of Arab resistance to the foreign occupation of Palestine. Training
centres were established in Qatana to prepare Arab volunteers to
enter Palestine under the banner of “The Arab Rescue Army”. Egypt
and Syria were thus the most important targets.
In his
220-page continually updated report, entitled: Bio-terrorism and
Bio-crimes: The Illicit Use of Biological Agents since 1900, dated
February 2001, Dr W Seth Carus of the Centre for
Counterproliferation Research, National Defence University,
Washington, DC, lists the following subtitle, p.87: Case 1947- 01:
“Zionist” Terrorists 1947-1948.
The cholera
outbreaks in Syria and Egypt received extensive attention in the
international press. The first report about the cholera in Egypt was
published in the Times of London on 26 September 1947, p4. By the
time the final cases appeared in January 1948, 10,262 people died.
He also states
that the outbreak in Syria was much smaller. It was limited to two
towns, about 60 kilometres south of Damascus, - close to Palestine
border. The first report appeared in the New York Times on 22
December 1947, p5.
The Syrian
army formed cordon sanitaria and the casualties were limited to 44,
including 18 deaths. Soon after, the Beirut French-language
newspaper, Orient, reported that several Zionist agents, who
employed cholera to disrupt the mobilisation of the volunteers’
army, were arrested.
These
incidents, together with Gaza poisoning, Carus states, were
described in the AHC complaint to the UN:
“The Jews
plan to use this inhuman weapon against the Arabs in the Middle East
in their war of extermination.
How did Ben
Gurion Start all this?
On the fourth
of March 1948, Ben Gurion wrote a letter to Ehud Avriel, one of the
Jewish Agency operatives in Europe, ordering him to recruit East
European Jewish scientists who could “either increase [our] capacity
to kill masses or to cure masses; both are important”. Avner Cohen
who cited an author in Ben Gurion Research Centre at Sdeh Boker
gives this truncated quotation.
To understand
the meaning of this quotation we must recall Ben Gurion’s doctrine:
the destruction of the Palestinian Society in
Palestine is a
necessary condition for the establishment of the state of Israel on
its ruins.
As a corollary to this doctrine, ethnic cleansing became an integral
part of Zionism. If Palestinians cannot be removed by massacres and
expulsion, they shall be removed by “extermination”.
The caveat by
Ben Gurion as “to cure the masses” is yet another twist by Ben
Gurion with an eye on history. For it is inconceivable that the
Arabs have the ability or the will in 1948 to cause “mass killing”
of the Jews using biological weapons. As it happened, Ben Gurion was
the first to use such weapons. His legacy, much more refined and
expanded, remains true till today.
Avner Cohen, a
senior fellow at the Centre for International and Security Studies,
and the Program on Security and Disarmaments at the University of
Maryland, wrote a comprehensive paper on Israel’s chemical and
biological weapons, which was published in the Non-Proliferation
Review, autumn 2001. Notwithstanding his background, which furnishes
a sympathetic understanding of Israel’s motives, his paper traces in
detail, from open sources and few interviews, the establishment and
development of Israel’s centre for biological terrorism.
Thrusting
Israel in the heart of the Arab world, Ben Gurion was determined to
achieve this extraordinary objective against all odds. “We are
inferior to other peoples in our number, but no other people are
superior to us in intellectual prowess,” Ben Gurion remarked.
In the 1940s,
he gathered around him Ernst David Bergmann, Avraham Marcus (Marek)
Klingberg (from the Red Army) and the brothers Aharon and Ephraim
Katachalsky (Katzir) - all experts in microbiology. They formed the
nucleus of the Science Corps in the Haganah during the British
Mandate. Ephraim Katachalsky was named commander of this new unit,
renamed HEMED, in May 1948. A dispute arose between Chaim Weizmann
who wished to establish a scientific institute for “clean” science,
while Ben Gurion insisted on building a “dirty” centre for
biological weapons. Both got their wishes realised. Weizmann
Institute for scientific research was built in Rehovot. A new unit
within HEMED, devoted to biological weapons and named HEMED BEIT,
was formed as a branch of the Israeli Army. Its head was Alexander
Keynan, a microbiologist from the medical school at the Hebrew
University in Jerusalem.
With the
depopulation of 530 Palestinian towns and villages in Al-Nakba of
1948, many buildings and homes became vacant and over half of the
Jewish immigrants in the 1950s were housed in them. The Chief of
Staff Yigal Yadin selected a home for the new biological weapons
development unit in a mansion located within a large orange grove
west of Nes Ziona. This unit, publicly known as Israel Institute for
Biological Research (IIBR), is still there today. The building was
expanded, surrounded by a three-metre wall, movement sensors and
watchtowers.
While IIBR
represents the front of a scientific institution, producing “clean”
papers and receiving invitations to scientific conferences, the real
biological weapons developed is carried within IIBR in a highly
classified centre (Machon 2, one of four) funded and controlled
directly by the Ministry of Defence.
Soon after the
poisoning of Acre and Gaza, Ben Gurion launched a crash project to
develop “a cheap non-conventional capability” in 1955. Why the rush?
As Cohen reports, Munya Mardor, the founder of Israel’s Weapons
Development Authority (RAFAEL), says that Ben Gurion was “evidently
concerned that we would not meet the deadline he had set, worrying
that the enemy would have such capability and we would have nothing
to deter or retaliate”. It turned out that the rush was to meet the
deadline for the Suez Tripartite Aggression of 1956. Ben Gurion was
prepared to bomb Egypt with biological weapons if his campaign
failed. As if that was not enough, Israel signed an agreement with
France to build a nuclear programme in the same year. Ben Gurion’s
emissary to France was none other than the peace-loving diplomat
Shimon Pensky (Perez).
Chasing the
Culprits
Naeim Giladi
is an Iraqi Jew who was lured to Israel by Mossad agents in the
early 1950s. Working with the enthusiasm and dedication of a new
Zionist, he soon found out that within the Ashkenazi establishment
“there was not much opportunity for those of us who were second
class citizens”, he told the editor of The Link in New York where he
immigrated after leaving Israel. “I began to find out about the
barbaric methods to rid the fledgling state of as many Palestinians
as possible. The world recoils today at the thought of
bacteriological warfare, but
Israel was
probably the first to actually use it in the Middle East.
Jewish forces would empty Arab villages of their population often by
threats, sometimes by gunning down a half-dozen young men so that
the Arabs could not return. The Israelis put typhus and dysentery
bacteria in the water wells to prevent the refugees from returning”.
[The Link, Vol. 31 Issue 2, April - May 1998].
Another
witness who spoke, former Mossad agent, Victor Ostrovsky, claims
that lethal tests have been performed on Arab prisoners inside the
IIBR compound.
The Dutch
Incidence
On 4 October,
1992 at 6.21pm, El Al Flight 1862 left Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport
on route to Tel Aviv, carrying three crewmen, one passenger and 114
tons of freight. Seven minutes later, it crashed in a high-rise
apartment complex in Bijlmer. El Al Flight 1862 became the worst air
disaster in Dutch history, killing at least 47 (the actual number is
unknown because many victims were immigrants) and destroyed the
health of 3000 Dutch residents. Cases of mysterious illnesses,
rashes, difficulty in breathing, nervous disorders and cancer began
to sprout in that neighbourhood and beyond.
The Dutch
government, in collusion with Israel, lied to its citizens saying
the plane was carrying perfumes and flowers. Some flowers! It took
the energetic and persistent science editor in the Dutch daily NRC
Handelsblad, Karel Knip, several years to discover the facts. Knip
published on 27 November 1999 the most detailed and factual
published investigation about the workings of biological terrorism
housed in IIBR.
First he found
out that the plane was carrying 50 gallons, among other things, of
DMMP a substance used to make a quarter ton of the deadly nerve gas
Sarin, 20 times as lethal as cyanide. It was carrying a shipment
from Solkatronic Chemicals of Morrisville, Pennsylvania to IIBR in
Israel, under a US Department, Commerce licence. This is contrary to
the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) to which the US, but not
Israel, is party.
With dogged
determination, Knip reviewed the scientific literature produced by
IIBR and the microbiology departments of the Faculty of Medicine in
the University of Tel Aviv and the Hebrew University since 1950. He
was able to identify 140 scientists involved in biological weapons
(BW) research.
Remarkably,
Knip was able to identify three categories of IIBR production:
diseases, toxins and convulsants, and their development in each
decade of the five past decades. The research moved from virus and
bacteria to toxins because they are many times more poisonous. Nerve
gases known as Tabun, Soman, Sarin, VX, Cyclo-Sarin, RVX and Amiton
are all deadly gases and function in the same way.
Knip went
further. He sought the assistance of experts in this field such as
Professor Julian Perry Robinson, University of Sussex, Brighton, Dr
Jean Pascal Zanders of SIPRI, Stockholm and Professor Malcolm Dando,
University of Bradford. They guided his research and explained his
findings.
Knip also
discovered close cooperation between IIBR and the British-American
BW programme. This programme deals with viruses and bacteria spread
by rodents and insects and covers smallpox, fungal diseases and
Legionnaires disease. It is to be noted that there was a breakout of
this disease in Philadelphia some years ago, and, surprisingly, in
an Eilat hotel in mid- January 2003.
The
cooperation with the US is quite open. The Congress “Joint Medical,
Biological and Nuclear Defence Research Programs” openly lists
cooperation with Israel on nerve agents and convulsants under the
guise of finding antidotes. It is plainly simple to realise that in
order to develop the antidote it is necessary to identify the poison
itself. Dr Avigdor Shafferman, IIBR director, is a frequent
contributor to this programme.
The
Palestinian Victims
In 1997,
Mossad agents tried to assassinate Khaled Mish’al, Hamas Political
Bureau’s director in Amman. King Hussein was furious at the blatant
violation of Jordan’s sovereignty and of the Peace Treaty with
Israel. As the attempt failed, thanks to Mish’al’s bodyguard, Israel
sent a lady doctor with the antidote. The toxin used is likely to be
SEB applied through a special gun, which has a range of 50 metres
and could inject the toxin in the neck.
The stories
about nerve gas applied against school children are plentiful. So
are the cases in which CBW is used.
Neil Sammonds lists these cases:
w Chemical
defoliants against Palestinian crops in Ain Al- Beida in 1968,
Aqraba in 1972, Mejdel Beni Fadil in 1978 and Negev in 2002.
w Chemical
Weapons, including hydrogen cyanide, nerve gas and phosphorous
shells in the 1982 war on Lebanon.
w Lethal gas
against Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners.
But the case
which was widely publicized all over the world and fully documented
by several international NGOs is the application of incapacitants,
particularly in Khan Younis, in February 2001. The pictures of
victims twisting with severe pain and uncontrollable convulsions
were splashed on TV screens everywhere.
James Brooks
of “Just Peace in Palestine/Israel” gave a detailed account of this
attack on civilians day by day as it happened. First, the victims
thought it was tear gas. It had a faint odour like mint. It smelled
“like sugar”, one victim reported. It changed colour “like a
rainbow”. Fifteen minutes later, the victim felt that his “stomach
was torn apart, with burning sensation in [his] chest, could not
breathe”. Soon convulsions started. The victim would vomit
incessantly and then pain would return. This would go on for days
or, for some, weeks.
In addition to
the numerous press and human rights reports, convulsing poison gas
victims in Khan Younis were filmed by the American filmmaker James
Longley, in a documentary that “pushes the viewer headlong into the
tumult of the Israeli occupied Gaza”. Longley compiled a 43-page
document of interviews with 19 gas victims, their relatives, nurses
and doctors.
These devilish
incapacitants drew the protest of some NGOs but little else. No
international investigation or censorship of any kind, even though
this was repeatedly used in March 02 in Al-Birch, Nablus and West
Bank and yet again in Gaza later that month.
Just the
contrary. There was a widespread Zionist- orchestrated condemnation
and disapproval when, in November 1999, Suha Arafat, the president’s
wife, charged the Israelis with the use of “poison gas” in the
presence of the aspiring politician Hillary Clinton. The height of
hypocrisy and cynicism was attained when the incensed Israeli
authorities declared that Suha’s factual statement is “a violation
of the peace process”!
There are as
yet unseen and long-term effects of toxins and incapacitants. On 3
February 2003, Dr Khamis Al-Najjar, director of Cancer Research
Centre of the Ministry of Health in Ramallah reported an alarming
increase in cancer cases, especially among women and children. The
report covers the period 1995-2000 and shows 3646 cases, with more
than half among females. The cases in Gaza are more than the West
Bank. The report, citing the rate of increase, predicts that cases
will triple in the near future. Taking note of the Israelis’
paranoia about Palestinian demography and judging by their previous
record, it is possible that the accumulative effect of the Israeli
application of toxins and incapacitants has produced the increased
incidence of cancer cases.
Israel has
signed but not ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention and is not a
party to the Biological Weapons Convention. Israel does not
recognise the application of the Fourth Geneva Convention on the
Occupied Palestinian Territories of the West Bank and Gaza, as
the rest of the world does. This is not surprising. Israel violates
every rule in the book.
There is a
plethora of conventions, which Israel constantly violated, starting
with Geneva Protocol of 1925 on Poisonous Gas to the 1993 Convention
on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and
Use of Chemical Weapons.
With this
background, it seems a mockery of justice to dispatch hundreds of
inspectors to destroyed workshops and private homes in Iraq, while
huge tons of weapons of mass destruction are staring them in the eye
in Israel. Perhaps the 10 million people in 600 cities around the
world who demonstrated against the war on Iraq on 15 and 16 February
were trying to point out this irony in refusing this war. Some
placards said so in clear terms.
Perhaps the
domestic voice in Israel may be listened to more attentively. The
Mayor of Nes Ziona, located a mere 10 kilometres away from Tel Aviv
centre, complained that the proximity of IIBR to his city poses a
great danger to the population, in case of accident. He is right.
The Science Committee in the Knesset reported 22 casualties
including three fatal cases in the last 15 years. But these were
mild cases.
The 1967 War
was followed quickly by what came to be known as the War of
Attrition, which lasted until mid-1970. During that period, Israel’s
air force bombarded factories, bridges and barrages throughout
Egypt, and killed hundreds of Egyptian prisoners of war in the
Sinai. According to United Nations figures, the Jewish State
violated the truce with Arab countries 43,000 times between 1948 and
1967. And, in the five-year period after 1967, its attacks on
Palestinian refugee camps resulted in the deaths of 2,500 civilians.
On 8 April 1970 Israeli warplanes dropped napalm bombs on the Bahr
el Baqar school in Sharkia province, 80 kilometres north of Cairo,
killing 46 school children (all under the age of 11).
Top |
