A cartoon in the Palestinian press depicting Israel and the coronavirus pandemic as equal threats. Photo: Palestinian Media Watch.

The Palestinian Authority’s official newspaper recently accused Israel of launching a coronavirus “holocaust” against Palestinian prisoners in its custody, even as UN officials praised Israeli and Palestinian leaders for their strong cooperation in combating the pandemic.

An editorial in the PA mouthpiece Al-Hayat al-Jadida falsely claimed that the spread of coronavirus in Israel had “caused the Palestinian prisoners in the occupation’s detention camps to protest and return the food portions, because the occupation authorities have not taken the necessary steps to prevent the spread of the virus, and added insult to injury when they withheld disinfectant and cleaning materials from the prisoners — as if we are on the brink of a holocaust against the Palestinian prisoners, but not through ovens but rather through an invisible virus that still has no cure!”

Comparisons between Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails and the murder of millions of Jews in gas chambers (“ovens”) by the Nazis during World War II are routine in the Palestinian press.

The same March 25 editorial, translated by the Israeli NGO Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), went on to charge that the “colonialist and settlement occupation system in the era of [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu is proving for the millionth time that it is the most dangerous ‘human virus’ known to man.”

Only last weekend, the UN’s special coordinator for the Middle East, Nickolay Mladenov, warmly praised the practical cooperation between the Israeli and Palestinian authorities in countering the coronavirus, describing the joint efforts as “excellent.”