The last few weeks Israel and its surroundings – including the PA and the Gaza Strip – have experienced extremely heavy showers, which have led to flooding in many areas.
As is its custom to blame Israel by default, the PA hurried and accused Israel of “flooding the civilian lands in eastern Gaza”:
“The occupation forces yesterday [Jan. 18, 2020] opened the dams gathering rain water in the direction of the civilian lands in eastern Gaza City, which caused the flooding of hundreds of dunams (1 dunam = 1,000 sq. meters) in agricultural areas.”
[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Jan. 19, 2020]
The official PA daily even came up with “an eye witness” who apparently stated that Israel “deliberately opened… rain water dams and gutters, which caused the flooding of hundreds of dunams of wheat, barley, and legume crops, and other crops.”
This “eye witness” must have extraordinary vision because Israel has no dams in southern Israel that can be opened!
This is not the first time Palestinians have disseminated this libel. In 2015, Al-Jazeera printed the false claims from Palestinian sources that Israel had deliberately flooded Gaza by opening alleged dams. But realizing that Israel has no such dams, Al-Jazeera retracted the claims the next day:
“Editor’s note: An earlier version of this page hosted an article which stated that Israel had, without warning, opened a number of dams, which had resulted in a part of Gaza being flooded. This was false. In southern Israel, there are no dams of the type which can be opened. We apologise for this error.”
[Al-Jazeera, Feb. 25, 2015]
Palestinian Media Watch has documented that the PA regularly blames Israel for all the bad that is happening in the world.
The following is the flood libel in the official PA daily:
Headline: “This is the third time: The occupation is flooding the civilian lands in eastern Gaza”
“The occupation forces yesterday [Jan. 18, 2020] opened the dams gathering rain water in the direction of the civilian lands in eastern Gaza City, which caused the flooding of hundreds of dunams [1 dunam = 1,000 sq. meters] in agricultural areas.
Eye witnesses said that the occupation deliberately opened – for the third time within a week – rain water dams and gutters, which caused the flooding of hundreds of dunams of wheat, barley, and legume crops, and other crops…
It should be noted that the occupation authorities opened the dams twice at the beginning and middle of last week, and that their planes sprayed the agricultural crops with harmful substances, which led to their destruction.”
[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Jan. 19, 2020]
