2 min read
ByMiriam Shaviv, Miriam Shaviv
Palestine Today reveals the latest Zionist weapon, which they allege is being used against Jerusalem's Arab population: rats.
Rats have become a weapon used by new Israeli colonizers against citizens in the Old City of occupied Jerusalem, in order to displace and expel them from their homes.
Districts in the old part of town are suffering and facing recently this new type of Israeli actions that aim to harass Jerusalemites in order to force them to leave...
For two months, dozens of settlers have been going to the alleys and streets of the old town, carrying with them dozens of iron cages full of rats, and to release them in the town into open drainage channels.
The citizens of the old town say that the rats grow very large, adding that different types of poisons did not contribute to eradicating them, and pointed to the large municipal slowness in dealing with this issue which is causing a humanitarian catastrophe and environmental losses.
According to Hassan Khater, Secretary General of the Islamic-Christian Front for Defending Jerusalem and its Holy Sites, these rats pose a major threat to Jerusalemites who inhabit these neighborhoods, and that the situation is serious and very poor, emphasizing the failure of the occupation in the municipality of Jerusalem to address the issue.
He reported during a press conference held in the government media center in Ramallah yesterday that the purpose of this measure is to increase the suffering of Jerusalemites in the old town, transforming their lives through the tragedy of fact, with the aim of pushing them to leave their homes and leave the city.
Khater added that the Front had received many complaints and comments from citizens Jerusalemites living in the revival of the old town, according to sabotage these rats property large number of houses and shops, calling to shed further light on this disaster.
There is a link between the colonists active in the deployment of rats in alleys of the Old City meant for the deportation and displacement of populations, and between the occupation and the deployment of hundreds of pigs in the mountains and valleys of the West Bank aimed at sabotaging the property and crops.
Of course, the idea of settlers roaming the city, freeing feral rats is highly unlikely: not just because such a plan would be ridiculous and useless, but because both sides of Jerusalem, East and West, are already swarming with feral rats - and always have been.
Some people believe, for example, that the siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE was caused by an infestation of rats that led to a sudden deadly plague in the city.
A couple of millenia later, in the 1930s, a heavy rat problem led to the British - then in control of the country - releasing hundreds of cats in the city. The long-term result was that Jerusalem became plagued by stray cats, a problem which remains - and which Jerusalem is notorious for - to this day. But the rat problem was never really solved.
They say that you are never more than 15 metres away from a rat in London, and that there are more rats than human beings in North America. But Jerusalem is the only city I have ever lived in where I have been constantly aware of them.
It started when I opened the door to my bedroom one evening to find an enormous rat scurrying across my desk (it had climbed in through an open window); it took me another eight months to be able to open the door again without staring at that exact spot to make sure the rat had really gone. It continued several months later with a rat making its way into my roommate's closed food cupboard and munching its way through some of her best chocolate and nuts. Not to mention several other too-close encounters across the city, in some of its very finest neighborhoods, which I won't go into here; Suffice to say, I've been left with a real phobia of rodents.
The Holy City's dirty little secret.
(Via, who had the Palestine Today piece auto-translated through Google)