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The Palestinian Authority (PA) has perpetuated another "drug libel," Palestinian Media Watch reports Wednesday - a continuation of the anti-Semitic trope ("blood libel") whereby Jews are accused of purposefully harming their neighbors in odd and counterintuitive ways. 

In this round of Palestinian incitement against Jews, the Governor of Ramallah Laila Ghannam claimed in an official PA TV interview that Jews have set loose drug dealers in Arab neighborhoods. 

"There is an attempt to introduce drugs among our children, especially in the Jerusalem district which is open to Israelis, and to destabilize  the public peace," Ghannam claimed. The interview aired on Friday. "There are murders, and these things do not happen by chance. This is a intentional policy of the Zionists who are trying to create an internal occupation within us, in addition to the political occupation."

The PA has been guilty of "drug libel" on multiple occasions.

In June, Jenin District Governor Ibrahim Ramadan kicked off "International Anti-Drug Week" by saying that "the danger posed by drugs is not merely medical, but also social and moral," and that "[drugs] recognize no political or social borders, and that their only source is the occupation, which is attempting to strike at the Palestinian home front," according to the PA official daily, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida.

Five months earlier, Adnan Al-Damiri, the official spokesman of the PA Security Forces, claimed that Israel "has spit up and vomited a shocking amount of drugs onto our land" and that they seized "a drug lab turning marijuana into heroin." 

And in 2012, PMW exposed five different articles in which PA officials had claimed Israel was distributing and manufacturing drugs in the PA, through a "systematic policy to destroy Palestinian society."