Mahmoud Abbas’ Palestinian Authority (PA) has intensified its longstanding blood libel campaign against Israel, falsely accusing Israel of conducting horrific Nazi-like medical experiments on Palestinian prisoners. These fabrications have been featured repeatedly in the Palestinian Authority’s official newspaper, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, which is under the direct authority of Mahmoud Abbas.

Three new examples in the past week:

·        “The method employed by the Israeli Occupation in which they [are] instigating slow death … doctors in Israeli prison clinics use the prisoners as guinea pigs for clinical drug testing under the pretense of ‘treatment.'” (Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, July 6, 2008).

·        “Many of the male and female inmates received injections from needles they had not seen before, and which caused their hair and facial hair to fall out permanently … others lost their sanity, or their mental condition is constantly deteriorating… and some are suffering from infertility” (Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, July 4, 2008).

·        “The doctors in these prison clinics are using the prisoners as guinea pigs for clinical testing of drugs and treatment-methods.” (Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, July 3, 2008), translations courtesy of ‘Palestinian Authority Libel: Prisoners are used for Nazi-like medical experiments,’ Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), July 9, 2008).

Palestinian Media Watch adds that “Giving voice to blood libels and slandering Israel are essential tools used by the Palestinian Authority to demonize Israel and to inflame hatred against Israel, especially on the highly sensitive subject of Palestinian prisoners. It is therefore not surprising that the Palestinian public places the release of Palestinian terrorists from Israeli prisons as a national cause, and justifies all means — including the abduction of Israeli soldiers – to free the prisoners from their supposed mistreatment. Al-Hayat Al-Jadida has attested that reports about such “experiments” performed on Palestinian prisoners serve to “mobilize each and every human-being as such… to actively participate in activities aimed at their release and their return to freedom, properly meant as a return to life… all of us! all of us! all of us! – to confront the enemy in the war it wages” (Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Sept. 3, 2007).

ZOA National Chairman of the Board Dr. Michael Goldblatt said, “This latest example of a Palestinian blood libel against Israel and the Jewish people – whom PA officials have previously blamed for poisoning water supplies and arable land, faking evidence of the Holocaust, using drugs to destroy Palestinian society and other obscenities – only underscores how Mahmoud Abbas has done nothing to end the incitement to hatred and murder in the PA-controlled media, mosques schools and youth camps that feed terrorism.

“Abbas sometimes claims that he does not have a sufficiently large security force to combat terrorism. But he does not need a security force to order his own newspaper to stop its vicious anti-Jewish incitement. All he needs to do is give the order. But then the ZOA has no expectation of a man like Abbas who is himself a Holocaust denier and who told a Fatah rally in Ramallah in 2007 that ‘The sons of Israel are mentioned as those who are corrupting humanity on earth.’ We urge the Bush Administration to cease ignoring the reality of Abba’s extremism and lack of credibility as a peace partner and sever all ties to him and his corrupt, terror-supporting and anti-peace regime.”