If you believe the Israeli army has become immoral only after the 7th of October 2023, you are dead wrong. Read this:
During the 1948 war, the Zionist Haganah and the newly formed IDF did not rely on conventional warfare alone.
Israeli historians Benny Morris and Benjamin Z. Kedar have documented a covert biological warfare campaign known as “Cast Thy Bread” or “Shallah Lahmekha”, in which Arab water sources were deliberately contaminated with bacteria, including typhoid and dysentery agents. The operation targeted wells and water systems in places such as Acre, where a typhoid outbreak preceded the city’s fall, and included attempted operations elsewhere, including Eilabun and the Gaza area.
What had long been dismissed as rumour has since been substantiated through declassified Israeli military archives, references in David Ben-Gurion’s diary, British, Red Cross and Arab reports, and the detailed research published by Morris and Kedar in Middle Eastern Studies.
The significance is not only historical but legal and moral. The poisoning of civilian water sources violated the 1925 Geneva Protocol’s prohibition on bacteriological warfare and formed part of a wider strategy designed to weaken Arab communities, spread fear, impede military movement and discourage the return of displaced Palestinians. Its overall battlefield impact may have been limited, but the precedent is stark: biological contamination was used as an instrument of war and population control during Israel’s foundational conflict.