After using vicious dogs and wild boar against Palestinians, Israel has announced a plan to use Nile crocodiles to guard Palestinian political prisoners. The country's national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, announced the new measure early last month. This report is based on an article by Middle East Eye.

The scheme is to be introduced first at Ketziot, Israel's largest prison, in the al-Naqab (Negev) desert. The prison is also known as the Ansar 3 camp, where thousands of Palestinians were held and tortured during the first intifada between 1988 and 1995.

As part of the plan, environmental protection minister Idit Silman has reclassified crocodiles as "domesticated wildlife". Under the new rules the reptiles would be released into artificial moats or channels around the Palestinian prisoners.

Ben-Gvir is said to have been inspired by "Alligator Alcatraz", an immigrant detention centre in Florida in the United States that Donald Trump visited last year. The Florida centre is built in the middle of a vast wetland full of crocodiles, alligators and pythons. The article describes this as one colonial state taking an idea from another.

The article argues that Israel has long used animals to dominate and abuse Palestinians, and as a way of returning Palestine to an imagined Hebrew past. Zionist and Israeli leaders regularly compare Palestinians to animals, but this "animal weapon" is not only a metaphor; it also involves the use of real animals.

Zionist and Israeli leaders have long described Palestinians as "animals", often naming particular species. To justify the genocide in Gaza, then defence minister Yoav Gallant called Palestinians "human animals".

Earlier, in the 1960s and early 1970s, then defence minister Moshe Dayan called Palestinians "wasps" and "dogs" without distinction.

In the 1980s, then prime minister Menachem Begin called Palestinians "two-legged beasts", while former army chief Rafael Eitan regarded them as "cockroaches". Another prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, called Palestinian protesters "grasshoppers".

In 2000, then prime minister Ehud Barak even described Palestinians as "crocodiles".

But Ben-Gvir's plan is not only a matter of metaphor, nor is it new. For decades Israel has used animals to humiliate and oppress Palestinians, while also killing Palestinians' domestic animals along with Palestinians themselves.

A harrowing Al Jazeera report of 28 November 2023 showed the Palestinian writer and poet Refaat Alareer, then volunteering in Gaza, documenting dead and starving animals in a destroyed zoo. Only a week later Refaat and his family were killed in an Israeli strike.

When they are not killing Palestinians' livestock, Israeli settlers steal it. In 2018 Israel even took the Palestine viper, a snake native to Palestine, and declared it its own "national snake".

The Zionist interest in animals, especially snakes, goes back to the beginning. Theodor Herzl, founder of the Zionist movement, set out in his diary what should be done about the inhabitants of Palestine and its snakes.

After discussing expelling Palestinians and settling European Jews there, Herzl wrote that if they moved into areas with venomous or large snakes, the local people would be used to exterminate the snakes until the European Jews became accustomed to the place, with large rewards paid for snakeskins. More than a century on, despite every effort, Palestinians remain on their own land.

Under British rule in the late 1930s, the British brought vicious dogs from South Africa and set them on Palestinian revolutionaries. The dogs were kept hungry and agitated and then let loose to tear at the prisoners' flesh.

After 1967 Israel began new kinds of "animal attacks" on Palestinians. Long before the crocodile project it had been using dogs, wild boar, sheep, cattle, deer, wild asses and birds as instruments of oppression.

Avraham Yoffe, a 1948 commander who later headed the Israel Nature and Parks Authority, launched a project to bring back to Palestine the animals mentioned in the Bible.

As part of it, two rare species, the Persian fallow deer and the Asiatic wild ass, were brought to Israel from Iran. The animals were obtained from the royal zoo in 1978, just before the Islamic revolution in Iran.

When the wild asses, which are mentioned in the Book of Job, were released in the Negev desert, they got in the way of the camels of local Palestinian Bedouin. Palestinians were heavily fined for letting their animals drink from water reserved for the asses. In 2018 and 2019 alone, Palestinian Bedouin were fined 544,300 shekels (about 160,000 US dollars) in 76 cases.

For the deer, Israel in 2005 legalised the killing of wild dogs in the Jerusalem hills to make the area safe for them. Just as Palestinians are displaced, Palestinian dogs and camels are being driven from their land in the name of making it "Jewish" again.

Israel has also banned and criminalised keeping the goldfinch, a small, brightly coloured songbird traditional in Palestine. But its "animal warfare" goes far beyond stories of deer, asses and birds, and is far more violent.

Since 2009 Israel has used wild boar as a weapon against Palestinians in the West Bank. In 2014 and 2022 Israeli settlers brought wild boar by truck and released them into Palestinian communities.

Besides attacking Palestinians, the boar cause widespread damage to farmland and crops. Palestinians cannot kill them either, because the animals are a protected species under Israeli law.

In April 2025 the Israeli army released 18 wild boar in Iktaba, a village near the Nur Shams refugee camp in the occupied West Bank. The boar were released to frighten Palestinians who had been driven out so that they would not return home.

In Gaza, alongside the genocide, Palestinians' donkeys and horses have been taken. People in Gaza rely mainly on donkeys and horses for transport, carrying drinking water, collecting firewood and farming. Besides destroying 84 per cent of Gaza's plants and more than 97 per cent of its livestock, including cattle, goats and sheep, Israeli forces have seized the remaining donkeys.

While Palestine's local dogs were killed to protect rare deer, trained attack dogs are being imported from Europe for use against Palestinians.

The Netherlands supplies these attack dogs to Israeli forces. Israel's Oketz canine unit brings the dogs from Europe and trains them to terrorise civilians.

Between 2023 and 2025 Oketz carried out at least 146 dog attacks. In one of them, Muhammad Bhar, a 24-year-old Palestinian with Down syndrome and autism, was killed by a dog in his own home.

International media have also reported the torture of Palestinian prisoners with these trained dogs.

Finally, the article contrasts the "humanity" Israeli law shows towards animals with its treatment of Palestinians. In 2003 Israel's Supreme Court was praised around the world for a ruling that ended the force-feeding of geese.

Yet the same court has legalised the force-feeding of Palestinian prisoners to break their hunger strikes. Against this background, the article says, Ben-Gvir's plan to guard Palestinian prisoners with Nile crocodiles is part of a policy under which animals are protected while that protection is entirely absent for Palestinians.

Source: Jagonews24. First published in Bengali on The Agro News.