Jamal Obeid, Member of the Supreme Leadership Body of Fatah in Gaza, is pushing this outrageous accusation. The Palestinian Authority is an assembly of the absurd with its routine libels, but the world turns a blind eye to its unceasing propaganda.
One can only imagine the consequences if the reverse happened — if a member of Knesset levied a ridiculous accusation about the PA introducing rats to chase Israelis. The entire Western media would run it as a lead story to ridicule and vilify Israel.
“PA libel: Israel introducing rats to chase Palestinians,” by Itamar Marcus, Palestinian Media Watch, April 19,2026:
Last week, a PA official accused Israel of having “developed” giant rats that Israeli hi-tech had engineered to “particularly attack children and the sick.”
Today, a Fatah official accused Israel of “deliberately” introducing rats into Gaza.
After Oct. 7, 2023, Israel was forced to launch a counteroffensive against Hamas’ terror infrastructure, including tunnels, command centers, and bases embedded in and beneath civilian sites such as hospitals. The result was that Hamas caused massive damage to healthcare services and to large parts of Gaza’s general infrastructure.
Now, officials from the PA and Fatah have begun to spread an outrageous libel against Israel, that it had “developed” and “introduced” rats to infest parts of Gaza, and those Israeli rats are the cause of disease, not Hamas.
Yesterday, a Fatah official in Gaza accused Israel of deliberately introducing the rats:
Jamal Obeid, Member of the Supreme Leadership Body of Fatah in Gaza: “There are rodents in some areas of the Gaza Strip… that were not known here in the Strip. It seems that the Israeli occupation deliberately acted to introduce these rodents into the Gaza Strip; this is a fact and not just media propaganda. There is a visible fact.
[Fatah-run Awdah TV, Facebook page, April 18, 2026;
Fatah-run Radio Mawtini, Facebook page, April 18, 2026]This accusation followed, as Palestinian Media Watch reported earlier in the week, a PA official who accused Israel of “developing” especially large and aggressive rats to attack children and the elderly:…
CryHavoc says
DDo rats chase their own?
࿗Infidel࿘ says
They’d have had a point had they accused Israel of introducing snakes instead 🐍 😈
Taffy says
The pic in the article looks like a pet rat and not a Norway rat or a brown rat, the usual pest rat varieties.
Guess what? Wartime breeds rat infestations in otherwise rat-free neighborhoods. Cities such as New York where people throw food trash on the street and half eaten food in dumpsters never get rid of their rats. I find it difficult to believe that Gaza and the PA did not have a rat problem before the war. Maybe Hamas and 5he PA should shift its efforts from terrorism directed at Israel, to rat control.
Westman says
This claim is ridiculously stupid, illustrating the PA’s low estimate of world intelligence. Then, alternately, it doesn’t assign much intelligence to the PA for thinking that anyone would believe rats can be trained to identify “Israelis” and preferentially “chase” Palestinians.
Rats need a place to hide and food. Is there rubble for the rats shelter, reproduction, and where is the food waste dumped? The primary cause of large rats proliferating was the end result of Hamas attacking Israel. And what did the PA and Hamas do improve sanitary conditions? Likely, nothing. Both are utter parasites.
Tony says
Yes. The goal of Propaganda is for the people to lose confidence in the Truth, making people more easily divided, influenced, or controlled.
Bexarkat says
The PA must have a great intelligence service to discover that. I hope they do not find out the high tech pigeons the Israelis trained to drop high level acid “bombs” from low altitudes, or the high tech sardines crossed with Piranha fish to eat palestinians from the inside out, and the high tech ants trained to attack shwarma stands en masse. Please – no one tell them!
rick says
Rats are a warning to a community that it must watch its garbage and maintain healthier sanitation and do not allow its citizens to take garbage more seriously and not depose of it carelessly. All of these problems are not taken seriously by a regime that never practiced proper healthy sanitation and devoted all of its efforts into trying to kill Israelis. And this is another important issue as to why Israelis want nothing to do with the people of Gaza and their political authority which is Hamas. Other issues which Hamas has little interest in are health, education and any infrastructure issues apart from military ones. Hamas itself says that things like health and education are the responsibility not of Hamas but rather of the UN. Same would go for proper Sanitation. A people and their chosen party which are unfit to govern anyone.
somehistory says
Norway rats are large and aggressive. I’ve seen them and they are bad news. So, no technology would be necessary for new rats to be developed when the old variety is bad enough.
When areas are littered with things rats use for food, nesting, breeding and hiding, they arrive and settle in.
If rats were going to be used by the Israelis to attack people in gaza, wouldn’t they have been used against the hamas members? Release some into the tunnels where the terrorists were hiding, scheming, planning their escape to qatar?
Just another made-up lie in an attempt to excuse their own evil and make Israel the target once again Only the gullible and those who want to believe the worst possible will believe this lie.
Siddi Nasrani says
The only BIG FAT RATS in Gaza, are reared on Hate & have their Holy Quran war
instruction manual, are Hamas Quranimals.
PS Hamas is a Hebrew word meaning? You guessed it,= Violence, they live up to their name.
dumbledoresarmy says
Funny thing is… I could see the Israelis using rats.. but to SAVE lives not to destroy them. Rats are clever and trainable.. and one of the things they can be trained to do is to *detect unexploded ordnance*, such as mines! They are better at it than dogs, they’re very fast, and because they are smaller and lighter than dogs, they don’t set things off by stepping on them. there is a team of people who are using African pouched rats to de-mine swaths of countryside in Cambodia (after first training said rats to find mines and bombs, in Angola). Bomb-sniffer dogs were a critical part of the Infidel war effort in Iraq and Afghanistan… the IDF has many well-trained K9s.. but maybe in future there might be clever little rats, as well, detecting booby-traps and hidden bombs and mines.