Palestine Broadcasting Corporation (PBC) Director Rafat Al-Qudra made the claim about the genetically engineered rodents to Fatah-run Awdah TV on April 15, Jerusalem-based watchdog group Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) revealed.
A Palestinian Media Watch illustration of the rodent libel disseminated by Fatah, the ruling party of the Palestinian Authority, April 16, 2026. (Credit: PMW)
“All indicators point to there being a type of rodent—rats and mice, to be precise … These rodents … are of a special kind; they are large in size, and they particularly attack children and the sick … It is believed that these rodents were developed and experimented on specifically by the Israeli occupation,” Al-Qudra said in an interview.
P.A. and Fatah officials are spreading the libel to divert blame from Hamas for the damage to Gaza’s health care services and general infrastructure, which was a direct result of the terror group’s invasion of southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, PMW said.
“The Palestinian Authority systematically uses libels that present Jews and Israelis as a mortal threat to Palestinians to justify and encourage Palestinian terror and murder of Israelis as self-defense,” PMW founder and director Itamar Marcus told JNS.
The P.A. doubled down on its rat libel on April 18 when Jamal Obeid, a member of the Supreme Leadership Body of Fatah in Gaza, told Awdah TV: “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.”
“This rat libel joins other recent libels—all from official PA sources,” Marcus said. “For example, that Israelis think Palestinians are heirs of the Amalekites, which the Bible tells them they must kill, and that Israeli educational texts teach that non-Jews are pigs which “God created in the form of humans to serve the Jews.”
Another libel that Marcus recounted: “The occupation forces (i.e., Israel) opened graves and cut off the fingers of landowners, in order to sign with a fingerprint—when he is dead … on the sale of the land.”
“And one of my favourites from a few years ago: The woman in hell, Golda Meir, one of her nine famous phrases: ‘I hope that one day I will wake up and not a single Palestinian child will be alive.’
“All of these libels and lies convince Palestinians that their violence is glorious self-defense. P.A. libels and other demonization are the reason 82% of Palestinians in Judea and Samaria thought that Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack “was the correct decision.’ ”
The P.A. has employed a rodent libel before, Marcus revealed. In 2008, the P.A. claimed that Israel had developed a special rat immune to rat poison, aggressive and larger than usual and unafraid of cats. They were created to drive away Jerusalem’s Arabs.
The rats, according to this narrative, were also highly fertile. “It is known that this female rat gives birth seven times a year, each time giving birth to 20 babies, which compels Jerusalem’s [Arabs] today to face the dangers of settlement and the infestation of rats,” official P.A. daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, reported on July 18, 2008.
Jews in Jerusalem were unaffected by the rats, the P.A. claimed.
