Terrorist prisoners (illustration)
Terrorist prisoners (illustration)Flash 90

The Palestinian Authority (PA) continues to demonize Israel by spreading libels, including one claiming that Israel conducts medical experiments on Palestinian prisoners, poisons them and deliberately kills them.

Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) has exposed several incidents in which PA media spread this libel.

Last month, the official PA daily, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, stated that Israel carries out medical experiments and speculated that it "perhaps" poisons them as well:

"The occupation authorities conduct medical experiments on the prisoners, giving them medicines and perhaps poison," the newspaper claimed.

The director of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Prisoners' Affairs Commission and PA Parliament Member Issa Karake often reiterates this libel.

Recently, after visiting a released prisoner, Karake stated that sick prisoners "are victims of severe crimes committed against prisoners in prisons, which expose them to deadly, chronic diseases resulting from secret medical experiments on their bodies, and their deliberate negligence."

He has also claimed on official PA TV that "[Israeli] prisons have become the source of an epidemic, a source of death and a source of dissemination of diseases in the bodies of the prisoners."

The official PA daily has in the past claimed that Israeli prisons have a "system called 'slow death'" to do away with prisoners, and has compared Israeli treatment to the medical experiments of Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, who experimented on Jews in the Auschwitz concentration camp.   

 "[There is] an entire system called 'slow death,' which the Israeli establishment uses against Palestinian prisoners, from the moment of their arrest until they are released... The 'experiments' stage is perhaps one of the most dangerous stages in the slow death of released prisoners, who suffer from diseases, which they contracted in prison. This way, the Israeli jailers attempt to imitate the German Nazis, who were the first to use prisoners as guinea pigs, for testing the weapons and the deadly drugs, which they developed. The Nazi German doctor, Josef Mengele, was the most famous among them," claimed Al-Hayat Al-Jadida in a report published on April 17, 2011.

Palestinian Media Watch has publicized statements by released prisoners that clearly contradict these libels about prison doctors infecting prisoners with fatal diseases and conducting medical experiments on them.

One prisoner stated that Palestinian prisoners "lack nothing," another said that a typical day in prison is spent "chatting, talking, eating, drinking, joking and playing," and relatives visiting family members in prison explained that they encountered no problems.

If there was any truth to the PA's allegations of medical experiments, noted PMW, one would expect prisoners and released prisoners to draw attention to such practices.

However, in 2011, when prisoners on hunger strike released their demands to change prison protocol, there was no mention of medical experiments or abuse. Indeed, their demands were all related to normal prison routine, including prison luxuries such as demanding "to restore satellite TV channels".

These are just the latest examples of the PA’s continuous incitement against Israel, as the world continues to urge Israel to conduct peace talks with the PA.

In November, after several stabbings and "car rampages" murdering Israelis near the Jerusalem light rail, Fatah took to Facebook to publish a slew of cartoons, videos, and other media praising the attacks and calling for more terrorism against Israelis and Jews. 

Days earlier, the ruling faction of the PA called for a "day of rage" against Israel on its page after Israeli security forces killed Mu'taz Ibrahim Khalil Hijazi, the terrorist behind the Yehuda Glick assassination attempt. 

Senior Fatah member Jibril Rajoub has in the past said that Jews deserved the genocide inflicted on them by the Nazis. He previously declared that if the PA had a nuclear bomb, it would use it against Israel.