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Well poisoning is the act of malicious manipulation of Drinking water resources in order to cause illness or death, or to deny an opponent access to fresh water resources.
Well poisoning has been historically documented as a strategy during wartime since antiquity, and was used both offensively (as a terror tactic to disrupt and depopulate a target area) and defensively (as a scorched earth tactic to deny an invading army sources of clean water). Rotting (both animal and human) thrown down Water well were the most common implementation; in one of the earliest examples of biological warfare, corpses known to have died from common transmissible diseases of the Pre-modern era such as bubonic plague or tuberculosis were especially favored for well-poisoning.
After World War 2, Nakam, a paramilitary organisation of about fifty Holocaust survivors, sought revenge for the murder of six million Jews during the The Holocaust. The group's leader Abba Kovner went to Mandatory Palestine in order to secure large quantities of poison for poisoning water mains to kill large numbers of Germans. His followers infiltrated the water system of Nuremberg. However, Kovner was arrested upon arrival in the British zone of occupied Germany and had to throw the poison overboard.
Israel poisoned the wells and water supplies of certain Palestinian towns and villages as part of their biological warfare program during the 1948 Palestine war, including an operation that caused a typhoid epidemic in Acre in early May 1948, and an unsuccessful attempt in Gaza Strip that was foiled by the Egyptians in late May.;
In the late 20th century, accusations of well-poisoning were brought up, most notoriously in relation to the Kosovo War. In the 21st century, Israeli settlers have been condemned due to suspicions of poisoning wells of villages in the occupied Palestine., Maariv, 13 July 2004, retrieved from Wayback Machine on 18 August 2008.
Walter Laqueur writes in his book The Changing Face of Anti-Semitism: From Ancient Times to the Present Day:
There were no mass attacks against "Jewish poisoners" after the period of the Black Death, but the accusation became part and parcel of antisemitic dogma and language. It appeared again in early 1953 in the form of the "doctors' plot" in Stalin's last days, when hundreds of Jewish physicians in the Soviet Union were arrested and some of them killed on the charge of having caused the death of prominent Communist leaders... Similar charges were made in the 1980s and 1990s in radical Arab nationalist and Muslim fundamentalist propaganda that accused the Jews of spreading AIDS and other infectious diseases.
In his address to the European Parliament on 23 June 2016, in Brussels, Palestinian Authority president and PLO chairman Mahmoud Abbas made an unsubstantiated allegation, "accusing rabbis of poisoning Palestinian wells". This was based on false media reports saying Israeli rabbis were inciting the poisoning of water of Palestinians, led by a rabbi Shlomo Mlma or Mlmad from the Council of Rabbis in the West Bank settlements. A rabbi by that name could not be located, nor is such an organization listed.
Abbas said: "Only a week ago, a number of rabbis in Israel announced, and made a clear announcement, demanding that their government poison the water to kill the Palestinians ... Isn't that clear incitement to commit mass killings against the Palestinian people?" The speech received a standing ovation. The speech was described as "echoing anti-Semitic claims". A day later, on Saturday 26 June, Abbas admitted that "his claims at the EU were baseless". Abbas' further said that he "didn't intend to do harm to Judaism or to offend Jewish people around the world." Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated in reaction, that Abbas had spread a "blood libel" in his European Parliament address.
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