The Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Health submitted a report that was used in formulating the UN World Health Organization’s (WHO) discriminatory resolution last week, which singled out Israel as the world’s only “health rights violator.”
That report included numerous claims and photographs negatively portraying Israel. There’s just one problem – many of the pictures were blatantly faked in an overt distortion of reality, and many of the unfounded claims were patently false.
CAMERA blog on Sunday revealed some of the contents of the PA report that informed WHO’s decision.
For example, the PA report claims Israel is “holding prisoners in polluted areas, such as in the vicinity of the Dimona reactor or near areas in which waste from that reactor has been buried.”
It also alleges: “In April 2013 the Russian newspaper Pravda accused Israel of injecting a number of Palestinian prisoners who were approaching their release date with cancer-causing viruses. Despite Israel’s rejection of the accusations made by the newspaper, the question remains: is it true that Israel is injecting prisoners with viruses?”
Another libelous claim is given from a Palestinian doctor, who claimed Israel freezes terrorists’ bodies and will only return them if they are buried immediately in a manner that “makes it impossible to ascertain whether the deceased individual’s organs have been stolen.”
But it was the picture section where the report truly shone in terms of blatant falsehoods.
On page 30 of the report a picture is presented showing a youth lifted in the air and pulled between a group of religious Jewish youths and Border Police officers. The PA defined the picture as presenting “settlers attacking a Palestinian child while being observed by Israeli occupation forces.”
However, blogger Israellycool revealed two years ago when the picture first began to circulate that it is a Getty Images picture from 2009 showing Jewish residents of Havat Gilad in Samaria being evicted – no Palestinian Arabs are at all present in the picture.
Then in its claims regarding 2014 Operation Protective Edge, the Palestinian Ministry of Health dug up a picture allegedly of an Israeli fighter jet performing a bombing run on Gaza, with the caption: “Photograph taken during the Israeli war on Gaza, 2014.”
Here too the poorly Photoshopped image is not authentic by any stretch of the imagination. Israellycool exposed it as a hoax back in 2014, when it was taken from a blog illustrating a story on how Israel could potentially strike Iran’s nuclear facilities. The PA erased the mountains and a tall building from the illustrative picture to make it look more similar to Gaza.
The report also uses photographs from Lebanon instead of Gaza in making its spurious accusations about Protective Edge, and it also uses a picture from Gaza dating back from 2012, passing it off as being from the most recent war that Hamas initiated.
When the report delves into the current wave of Arab terrorism that has raged since last September it maintains its libelous nature. One picture presents terrorist Yasmin Tamimi as a “girl killed in cold blood.”
CAMERA notes that the terrorist is not a “girl,” and it is not even clear she died. The Palestinian Center for Human Rights lists her as being 20-years-old and does not claim she was killed. The radical leftist group B’Tselem does not include her in its casualty list either.
Tamimi tried to stab a police officer after her engagement was reportedly called off. She was shot and seriously wounded, but survived and was evacuated for treatment at Jerusalem’s Shaare Tzedek Hospital.
Another picture used to ostensibly show wounded terrorists from the current terror wave dates back from at least 2009, according to the blog.