Israel using wild boars to fight Palestinians, American NGO claims

“Israel is using wild boars to strengthen its colonial hold on Palestinian land,” the socalled Institute for Middle East Understanding claims. 

By World Israel News Staff

Anti-Israel activists are claiming that Israeli “settlers” are using wild boars to threaten Palestinians, The Jerusalem Post reported Thursday.

“Israel is using wild boars to strengthen its colonial hold on Palestinian land,” the U.S.-based Institute for Middle East Understanding stated.

“Israeli settlers have been found to release wild boars onto Palestinian farmland as a form of abuse. These illegal settlers use the boars to pressure and intimidate Palestinians, hoping to drive them away from their lands and vacate them for illegal settlement growth,” the NGO said.

Palestinian researcher Rawan Samamreh wrote in the anti-Israel Mondoweiss site that Israeli environmental practices were allowing for the proliferation of wild pigs and denying Palestinian farmers the ability to defend themselves, the Post reported.

According to the Mondoweiss, the boars are not only damaging crops and property, but also attacking people.

“Using wild boars is part of an older Zionist imperative to colonize nature,” Samamreh claims. “The JNF [Jewish National Fund] pines were used as weapons of war, which due to their acidity would kill all nearby plants in the Palestinian landscape and make lands unusable for Palestinian shepherds. The same is true for the weaponization of wild boars in the West Bank countryside.”

Claims by anti-Israel activists and Palestinian officials about Israel’s alleged use of boars as a weapon is nothing new, the Post added, noting that in 2014, PA President Mahmoud Abbas accused Israel of releasing the wild animals against Palestinian residents on a nightly basis.

Coincidentally, the northern Israeli city of Haifa was threatened by boars in 2020 when the streets were empty of people during the coronavirus lockdown.