Poisoning the wells of Arce, Palestine
Poisoning the wells of Arce refers to an incident of biological warfare during the 1948 Zionist insurrection in Palestine. Israeli military historian, Uri Milstein, states about this period:
- “In many conquered Arab villages, the water supply was poisoned to prevent the inhabitants from coming back.”
According to Milstein, the typhoid epidemic that occurred in the Palestinian village Acre before it fell to Jewish terrorists was a deliberate biological attack and not just a coincidence of war. On 23 May 1948, Egyptian soldiers arrested four Jewish terrorists disguised as Arabs near water wells in Gaza. The Egyptian Ministry of Defense on 29 May issued a statements saying that four “Zionists” had been caught trying to contaminate artesian wells in Gaza with “a liquid, which was discovered to contain the germs of dysentery and typhoid.”
One of the terrorists, David Horin, confessed that their commander had given them a canteen filled with dysentery and typhoid bacteria “to be thrown into the well to kill the Egyptian army.” The four terrorists were tried, convicted, and executed by hanging three months later.
