Palestinian officials in Gaza last week escalated a series of extraordinary allegations, claiming that Israel is deliberately releasing “weaponized” rats into the Strip to attack civilians, particularly children and the sick, at a time when the territory is already grappling with a documented surge in rodent infestations tied to war damage and deteriorating sanitation.
According to the monitoring group Palestinian Media Watch, senior Fatah figure Jamal Obeid publicly asserted that rats appearing in parts of Gaza were not native to the area. “There are rodents in some areas of the Gaza Strip… that were not known here in the Strip,” Obeid said in statements broadcast on Fatah-affiliated outlets Awdah TV and Radio Mawtini. “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.”
Three days earlier, Rafat Al-Qudra, director of the Palestine Broadcasting Corporation in Gaza, made an even more specific claim in an interview. “All indicators point to there being a type of rodent—rats and mice, to be precise,” he said. “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.”
The Israel Defense Forces did not respond to the accusations.
The claims come as international organizations report a sharp increase in rodent-related health hazards in Gaza. Data cited by humanitarian agencies indicate tens of thousands of cases linked to infestations over the past year, alongside widespread reports of lice, scabies, and other sanitation-related illnesses in overcrowded displacement zones. Aid officials have pointed to collapsed infrastructure, uncollected waste, and dense living conditions as primary drivers of the problem.
At the same time, Palestinian Media Watch director Itamar Marcus argued that such allegations serve a different purpose. He stated that the Palestinian Authority has repeatedly circulated claims portraying Israel as engaging in fantastical and malicious acts, contributing to a narrative that frames violence as justified self-defense. Marcus noted that similar accusations have appeared in the past, including a 2008 claim that Israel engineered oversized, poison-resistant rats to drive Arabs out of Jerusalem.
The current allegations also echo a broader pattern of animal-related conspiracy theories directed at Israel. In 2010, after a series of shark attacks in Sharm el-Sheik, Egyptian commentators suggested Israeli involvement. In 2015, Hamas terrorists claimed to have captured a dolphin allegedly equipped with surveillance gear, describing it as an Israeli spy device. Additional claims have surfaced over the years involving so-called “killer dolphins” and other trained marine animals.
No evidence has ever substantiated these allegations.
What remains undeniable is that Gaza is facing a severe and growing public health crisis. Rodent infestations, like disease outbreaks, do not require covert engineering to spread; they thrive in the vacuum created by war, destroyed infrastructure, and the collapse of basic services.
The reappearance of such claims reflects more than a public health emergency. It reveals a persistent effort to recast internal collapse as external conspiracy. The result is a narrative that deflects responsibility while deepening hostility.
