Israel’s History of Chemical Weapons Use

The UN chemical weapons inspectors, who went to Syria to investigate the use of chemical weapons, should have stopped on their way at Occupied Palestine (Israel), where Israeli government has the largest stockpile of chemical and other WMD in the entire Middle East. They would have found a lot of evidence and witness accounts of Israeli use of chemical, as well as biological and nuclear, weapons against the Palestinians and their Arab neighbors. The attacks started in May 1948 and are still going on in one form or another.

The Zionist gangs under the directive and leadership of David Ben-Gurion, who became the first Israeli Prime Minister, had adopted a military policy of genocide, extermination and total destruction of the indigenous Palestinian inhabitants and their towns in order to evacuate the land for outsider Zionist Jewish occupiers. The first WMD they used was biological weapons as documented by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

In May 1948 the Zionist gangs besieged the well-fortified Palestinian city of Acre, which could stand the siege for a long time. The city water supply came from a nearby village name Kabri through an aqueduct. To shorten the siege and to enter the city, the Zionist gangs injected typhoid in the aqueduct. Many Palestinians and some 55 British soldiers, who were in the city, got infected. This crime was called operation “Shlach Lachmecha” as described by the Israeli military historian Urin Milstein [Wendy Barnaby’s “The Plague Makers: The Secret World of Biological Warfare”, London, Vision Paperbacks, 1997, pp 114-116]

The ICRC delegate Mr. De Meuron, sent a series of reports under the reference of G59/1/GC, G3/82, from 6th to about 19th of May 1948 describing the conditions of the city population as struck by a sudden typhoid epidemic and requested efforts to combat it. The minutes of an emergency meeting between Mr. De Meuron and the British Medical Services officers stated that the infection was “water borne”. Burdened by the epidemic the city fell easy prey to the Zionist gangs, who went into a killing spree and a systematic looting campaign as reported by Lieutenant Petite, a French UN observer. He reported the cold-blooded murder of at least 100 Arab civilians, who refused to evacuate the city as ordered by the Zionists. Some of them were captured by the Zionist terrorists and were forced at gun point to drink cyanide; the case of Mohamed Fayez Soufi is one example as documented in “The Palestinian Catastrophe” by Michael Palumbo.

This crime of poisoning Acre’s water supply leading to the fall of the city, the forceful evacuation of its inhabitants, and the looting of its treasures, whetted the appetite of the Zionists to repeat the crime. They tried it again in Gaza against the Egyptian forces, but failed. The two Zionist infiltrators, who were sent on this mission, were captured by the Egyptians. The following cable was sent from the commander of the Egyptian Forces in Palestine to the General Headquarters in Cairo:

“15.20 hrs, 24 May [1948]. Our Intelligence forces captured two Jews, David Horeen and David Mizrahi, loitering around army positions. 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 potable 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 the 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 his book “War Diary” Ben Gurion confirmed the attack in an entry found on 27th of May 1948 where he stated: “[Chief of Staff Yigal Yadin] picked up a cable from Gaza saying they captured Jews carrying malaria gems and gave instructions not to drink water.” The Israeli author Yeruham Cohen wrote more about this cable in his book “In Daylight and Night Darkness”; Tel Aviv, 1969, pp66-68 (in Hebrew). The two Zionist agents; Horeen and Mizrahi, broke out of prison but were captured again and executed.

The Zionist crimes did not stop then, but targeted Egypt and Syria. On 22nd of July 1948 the [Palestinian] Higher Arab Committee (AHC) submitted a 13-page report to the UN accusing the Jews (the term Israelis was not used then) of using “inhumane” weapons and waging a genocidal war against the Arabs through the use of bacteria and germs. The report accused the Jews of spreading Cholera in Egypt and Syria in 1947/48. The award-winning journalist, Thomas J. Hamilton of the New York Times picked up the story and published it on 24th of July 1948.

During the summer of 1947 the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) was sent to Palestine and its neighboring Arab states proposing the partition of Palestine giving about 54% of the land to new Jewish immigrants who controlled only 6% of Palestine. Their proposition was met with fierce opposition from the only two strong Arab countries; Egypt and Syria, recently freed from the French Mandate. Syria was the center of Arab resistance to foreign occupation of any Arab country. Syria has established training centers in Qatana to prepare Arab volunteers to join the Arab Rescue Army in Palestine. Egypt and Syria, thus, became the main targets of Zionist gangs.

In his 220-page continually updated report under the title “Bioterrorism and Biocrimes: The Illicit Use of Biological Agents since 1900” Dr. W. Seth Carus of the Center for Counterproliferation Research, National Defense University, Washington, DC, lists the following subtitle p. 87: “Case 1947-01: Zionist Terrorists 1947-1948.” He mentioned that the cholera outbreaks in Egypt and Syria had received extensive attention in the press. The first report about the cholera in Egypt was published in the Times of London on 26th September 1947 p.4. By the time the final cases appeared in January 1948 about 10,262 people had died.

The cholera outbreak in Syria was first reported by the New York Times on 22nd of December 1947 p. 5, but was limited to only two towns, Carus stated. The Syrian army formed a cordon sanitaire and the casualties were limited to 44 including 18 deaths. Soon after, the Orient; a Lebanese French-language newspaper reported that several Zionist agents, who employed the cholera germs to disrupt the mobilization of the volunteers army were arrested.

Assi, the son of Israeli General Moshe Dayan, wrote in his memoir published in Yediot that during the war his father brought home tubes containing typhus. He explained that the intent was to drop these tubes into the water supply of the Jordanian Legion. Before the plan was implemented one of the tubes broke and Assi got infected.

Naeim Giladi is an Iraqi Jew, who was lured to Israel by Mossad agents in early 1950s. He was a zealot Zionist, who later on left Israel after discovering its barbarism and immigrated to the US. He told the editor of The Link in New York that he discovered that within the Israeli Ashkenazi establishment:

“there was not much opportunity for those of us who were second class citizens. 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]

Avner Cohen, a senior member at the Center 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. His paper titled “Israel and Chemical/Biological Weapons: History, Deterrence, and Arms Control” was published in the Non-Proliferation Review in autumn of 2001.

Cohen stated that Israel’s chemical weapon started with David 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. If Palestinians cannot be removed by massacres and expulsion, they shall be removed by extermination.” To accomplish this extermination Ben Gurion wrote a letter to Ehud Avriel; a member in the Jewish Agency in Europe, ordering him to recruit East European Jewish scientists, who could “either increase capacity to kill masses or to cure masses; both are important.” Experts in microbiology such as Ernst David Bergmann, Avraham Marcus Klingberg and the brothers Aharon and Ephraim Katachalsky, were recruited to form the Sceince Corps in the Haganah which later was named HEMED. Later a new branch within HEMED, devoted to biological weapons was formed and called HEMED BEIT. This branch is publically known as Israel Institute for Biological Research (IIBR) and it expropriated the mansion of Shukri Al Taji; a Palestinian, near the settlement of Nes Ziona as its research center.

For years the IIBR center was developing chemical and biological weapons in secret until 4th October of 1992 when El Al Flight 1862 crashed into a high-rise apartment complex in Bijlmer, Amsterdam while on its way to Tel Aviv carrying three crewmen, one passenger and 114 tons of freight. The crash was considered the worst air disaster in Dutch history killing at least 47 and destroying the health of 3000 Dutch residents. Cases of mysterious illnesses, rashes, difficulty in breathing, nervous disorders and cancer began to sprout in that neighborhood. After several years of deep investigation Karel Knip, the science editor in the Dutch daily NRC Handelsbland, published in November 1999 the most detailed and factual report about the workings of the IIBR.

Knip revealed that the plane was carrying a shipment from Sokatronic Chemicals of Morrisville, Pennsylvania to IIBR, under the US Department of Commerce license, in violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). Among the shipment there were 50 gallons of DMMP; a substance used to make a quarter ton of the deadly nerve gas Sarin, 20 times as lethal as cyanide. He discovered that at least 140 biological weapon scientists from the IIBR have strong links with Walter Reed Army Institute, the Uniformed Services University, the American Chemical and Biological Weapons Center in Edgewood and the University of Utah. He also discovered close cooperation between IIBR and the British-American biological weapons programme, as well as extensive collaboration on biological weapon research with Germany and Holland, which explains the reason for the Dutch officials keeping silence over the crash over Amsterdam.

The numbers and details of the Israeli chemical and biological attacks against Palestinians are many and require large volumes to document. During the Palestinian Intifada the Palestinian youths were used as test subjects for new chemical weapons; toxins and incapacitants. James Brooks of “Just Peace in Palestine/Israel” gave detailed accounts of these attacks on civilians day by day as they happened; describing the severe convulsions, the burning sensation, the difficulty to breathe, the vomiting and pain the victims of these attacks had suffered. The documentary “Gaza Strip”, shot by the American filmmaker James Longley, documents Israel’s use of chemical weapons on Gaza residents. Such attacks were repeated in the West Bank cities of Al-Bireh and Nablus. Dr. Khamis Al-Najjar, the director of Cancer Research Center of the Ministry of Health in Ramallah, Palestine, highlighted in his February 3rd. 2003 report an alarming increase in cancer cases, especially among women and children. The report covers the period between 1995-2000 and shows 3,646 cases, mostly women.

Israel’s continuous use of chemical/biological weapons against Palestinians was most prominent in March 2001, October 2003, and June 2004 as investigated by these reports. Israel also used poison gas attacks against unarmed Palestinian civilians in Gaza in February 2001 as documented here . Israeli Mossad agents had also used chemical weapons in their assassination attacks against Palestinian leaders such as Hamas Leader Khaled Mesh’al, and Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, and are highly suspected of using nuclear poison in assassinating Yasser Arafat.

The whole world knows very well that Israel has been manufacturing chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, and has the largest stockpile of these WMD in the Middle Eastern region. In March 2003 the BBC television presented the documentary “Israel’s Secret Weapon” investigating Israel’s development of chemical/biological/nuclear (CBN) weapons.

The successive American administrations are very well familiar with Israel’s CBN weapons. The US Congress Office of Technology Assessment titled “Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction: Assessing the Risk”, pages 63-65, records Israel as a country possessing an offensive biological warfare capability and a long-term, undeclared biological warfare program. In 1983 The CIA produced a special report on Israel’s weapons program, but deleted this page dealing with the chemical weapons.

With Syria giving up its chemical weapons, now is the perfect opportunity to enforce the chemical weapons convention on all the countries in the region, including Israel, to free it from this WMD. Contrary to what Obama said, the convention does not specifically refer to just the use of chemical weapons, but also to its production and storage.

Will Obama, the peace-prize winner, prove that “the United States has been the anchor of global security … for nearly seven decades” as he claimed in his speech and demonstrate that the Americans are really “exceptional” as he boosted, or will he turn a blind eye to the Israeli criminal chemical attacks and the largest stockpile of WMD, like his many predecessors???

Dr. Elias Akleh is an Arab writer from a Palestinian descent born in the town of Beit Jala. His family was first evicted from Haifa after the “Nakba” of 1948, then from Beit Jala after the “Nakseh” of 1967. He lives now in the US, and publishes his articles on the web in both English and Arabic.

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