How many Palestinians will die because of the mendacity of Mohammad Dahlan and the pusillanimity of Mahmoud Abbas?

by Hugh Fitzgerald

As is well known, Israel has offered to supply the Palestinians with more than one million doses of COVID-19 vaccine. Its first shipment to the PA consisted of 90,000 doses, some of which were to expire at the end of June, and the rest at the end of July. This information was conveyed to the PA before it accepted the shipment, but having accepted it, the PA then changed its mind four hours later, when the PA announced it was not only returning the initial shipment of 90,000 doses, but was cancelling the entire agreement with Israel; it would no longer accept the one million doses Israel was prepared to offer. The official reason given for returning the vaccines was that the PA could not administer them before their expiration date. That was false. The story is here: “The Palestinian Authority could have finished inoculating 90,000 people with the returned vaccines by TODAY,” Elder of Ziyon, June 21, 2021:

The Palestinian Minister of Health, Mai Al-Kaila, gave a statement to the official Palestinian news agency Wafa with her spin on the vaccine debacle this weekend.

She accidentally revealed that even if it is true that the expiration date on the first batch was the end of June, the Palestinian Authority had the ability to use all of the vaccines well before their expiration.

In fact, they could all have been used by today [June 21].

Al Kaila said that the Ministry of Health has the ability to vaccinate 60,000 citizens daily.

Since the first batch of 90,000 vaccines that so upset the Palestinians were, according to them, expiring by the end of the month, by their own calculation the Ministry of Health could have easily administered all of the vaccine doses between June 18 and June 20, with ten days to spare.

By today [June 21], 90,000 people could have had their first shots, with over a week to spare for the expiration date. And no one says that the vaccine is less effective on the last days before expiration than when they are brand new from the factory.

Because of hatred of Jews and a counterproductive idea of “honor,” even according to their own statements, the Palestinian Authority chose not to protect its citizens from COVID-19.

What kind of a sick government does that?

While much of the world’s media have covered this story, mendaciously, as one of “Israel gives PA expired vaccines,” we should keep firmly in mind that the vaccines in the first shipment sent to the PA would not expire for twelve days after their delivery to the PA on June 18, that vaccines close to their expiration date are as effective as those that are months away, and that the PA Health Minister, Mia Al Kaila, herself said that her Ministry could vaccinate 60,000 Palestinians every day. Those 90,000 initial doses could all have been administered on June 18 and June 19. Why didn’t the Palestinians choose to do that? The answer is clear: they are more interested in scoring propaganda points against Israel, by misstating the facts, than they are in the health of their people.

And why hasn’t the world’s media, in covering this story of the Great Vaccine Farce, never mentioned that Mia al-Kaila, the PA Health Minister, had let slip the damning information that the PA could administer 60,000 doses a day, which meant it could easily have administered all the doses sent in the first batch in two days, and with a week to spare?

This brings us to the extraordinary charge made by Mohammad Dahlan, the former Fatah leader, expelled by Mahmoud Abbas from the West Bank, who now lives in the United Arab Emirates. He’s gone beyond the PA’s charge that Israel was deliberately supplying the Palestinians with “expired” vaccine doses that would be ineffective, to something far graver,: he’s accusing the Israelis, in a variant on the medieval blood libel, of deliberately trying to kill a half a million Palestinians.

His preposterous charge is discussed here: “Palestinian faction (Dahlan) claims that ‘expired’ vaccines would have killed half a million Palestinians,” Elder of Ziyon, June 21, 2021:

To Palestinians, if the truth is inconvenient, you might as well lie.

Before the Palestinian elections that never happened this year, the Fatah party was split into three components. One of them is the Democratic Reform Movement, which is headed by Mohammed Dahlan, who was placed in exile in the UAE by his rival Mahmoud Abbas.

The Dahlan party is attacking the Palestinian Authority – not for spurning perfectly good vaccines for hundreds of thousands of people, but for initially reaching a deal with Israel to bring in “expired vaccines.”

But it is not enough to lie about the vaccines being expired, as many “pro-Palestinian activists” are claiming. That isn’t dramatic enough. The Dahlan party is claiming that the vaccines are actually dangerous.

Ghassan Jadallah, the local leader of the Democratic Reform Movement, wrote on his Facebook page that the mainstream Fatah movement is hiding the person “who almost killed thousands of our citizens in an expired vaccine deal.”

Jadallah belongs to Mohammad Dahlan’s Fatah faction, that long ago was expelled from the dominant Fatah group by Mahmoud Abbas. Jadallah is claiming that the vaccines offered by Israel were not only ineffective against the COVID-19 virus, but were positively poisonous and that the person “who almost killed thousands of our citizens” – he doesn’t have to name him, for everyone knows whom he means – is none other than Dahlan’s arch-rival Mahmoud Abbas.

An article in the party’s mouthpiece said that “if a healthy person is vaccinated, the health consequences will be catastrophic and dire, because the vaccination is not valid and the vaccine is expired, …. entering into a journey of suffering and misery that will end in death.”

Another article in that organization’s news mouthpiece said that the deal “endangered the lives of half a million Palestinian citizens at risk of death, in the largest attempted murder in Palestinian history.”

The Fatah offshoot is saying that, obviously, Israel intended to kill a half million Palestinians with these expired vaccines, because that’s what Jews do. Their anger is against Abbas, though, for making a deal with genocidal Jews.

The charge is, of course, absurd. We are expected to believe that the vaccine, if administered when it has expired, makes the inoculated “enter into a journey of suffering and misery that will end in death.” There are no reports, from anywhere in the world, of expired vaccines causing sickness and death; they are ineffective against COVID-19, but not themselves dangerous. Dahlan, however, assumes that all of the vaccines Israel was going to deliver to the PA would already have expired. There is not the slightest evidence of this.

Mohammed Dahlan blames not just the endlessly evil Jews, whose offer of more than a million doses to the PA “endangered the lives of half a million Palestinian citizens at risk of death, in the largest attempted murder in Palestinian history,” but even more, his Palestinian archrival Mahmoud Abbas, head of the PA, whom Dahlan blames for being willing to accept, and then administer, the (supposedly expired) vaccine doses offered by Israel, which will not only be ineffective against COVID-19, but positively fatal, to the Palestinians who take it. Fortunately, pressure from Dahlan and his faction of Fatah have force Abbas to retract his acceptance of vaccines from Israel. Dahlan doesn’t explain how the deaths of a half-million Palestinians would help Mahmoud Abbas. Logic is not Dahlan’s strong suit.

The height of absurdity has now been reached. We are expected to believe that Israel wants to murder a half-million Palestinians with expired vaccines; that Mahmoud Abbas was in on this deadly conspiracy, and that somehow, as those half-million Palestinians start dropping dead, no one will notice and call a halt to the vaccinations.

Mohammed Dahlan likes to make charges of mass poisoning. When the Israelis withdrew from Gaza in 2005, Dahlan claimed that Israel had “poisoned the soil” at the settlements they left, so that it could not be used by the Palestinians for agriculture. No evidence was ever produced for this astonishing claim, and Dahlan never retracted this charge – but simply went on to other things.

And now, given the inflammatory charge by Mohammad Dahlan, that the vaccines offered by Israel could “murder half-a-million Palestinians” – a preposterous charge, but one that many Palestinian, raised to hate the evil Jews, will credulously believe – there will be no possibility for the PA to accept any vaccines, no matter how efficacious, from the “Zionist enemy.” How many Palestinians will sicken and die because of the mendacity of Mohammad Dahlan and the pusillanimity of Mahmoud Abbas?

First published in Jihad Watch.