Ben Gvir's crocodiles are the latest weapon in Israel's animal warfare on Palestinians

Earlier this month, Israel's National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir announced that Israel would use Nile crocodiles as prison guards for Palestinian political prisoners. The programme will begin at Ketziot Prison, Israel's largest, in the Naqab (Negev) desert. The prison served as a concentration camp where thousands of Palestinians were incarcerated between 1988 and 1995 during the First Intifada. Palestinians knew Ketziot as Ansar III camp. To facilitate this plan, Environmental Protection Minister Idit Silman declared the crocodile a "cultivated wild animal". Under this new taxonomy, the reptiles will be released into moats around Israel's dungeons, where Palestinians are imprisoned and treated like animals. Ben Gvir was inspired by the new Florida migrant detention centre, dubbed "Alligator Alcatraz", which US President Donald Trump toured last year. This prison of horrors "sits in a vast subtropical wetland filled with alligators, crocodiles and pythons". It is a case of one settler-colony inspiring another. New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters Animals have long figured in Israeli strategies for dominating and oppressing Palestinians and for "returning" Palestine to its fantasised Hebrew past. Zionist and Israeli leaders have regularly compared Palestinians to animals, but Israel's animal warfare goes beyond metaphors to involve real animals. Animal warfare Zionist and Israeli leaders have long described Palestinians as "animals", often specifying the species. To justify the launch of its genocide in Gaza, for example, Israel's then Defence Minister Yoav Gallant called Palestinians "human animals". In contrast, in the 1960s and early 1970s, Israel's Defence Minister Moshe Dayan could not choose which species of insects or mammals Palestinians resembled most, and called them "wasps" and "dogs" in the interest of non-discrimination. For decades, Israel has used animals to oppress and humiliate Palestinians, while targeting both with its killing machine By the 1980s, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin elevated them to "two-legged beasts", while former Israeli chief of staff Rafael Eitan downgraded them again to "cockroaches". Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir preferred the entomological category, describing Palestinian protesters as "grasshoppers". Ironically, in 2000, Prime Minister Ehud Barak described Palestinians as "crocodiles". Ben Gvir's plan, it would seem, is to have real crocodiles guard metaphorical ones. Similes and metaphors aside, the minister's scheme does not inaugurate animal warfare against Palestinians. For decades, Israel has used animals to oppress and humiliate them, while targeting both Palestinians and their animals with its killing machine, treating them as the same species. In one chilling Al Jazeera English report from 28 November 2023, Palestinian writer and poet Refaat Alareer, volunteering with the Gaza municipality, walks viewers through the devastated city zoo, documenting dead and starving animals. A week later, Israel would carry out the now-infamous killing of Alareer and several members of his family amid its ongoing genocide. When not killing Palestinian animals, Israeli settlers have also stolen them, along with cattle and other Palestinian livestock. Israel even stole the native Palestinian viper in 2018 and declared it its "national snake". Follow Middle East Eye's live coverage of Israel's genocide in Gaza Zionist concern with animals, especially snakes, goes back to the Zionist Organization founder, Theodor Herzl, who outlined in his diaries what should be done with Palestine's indigenous people and animals. After discussing how to expel Palestinians and replace them with European Jewish colonists, he wrote: If we move into a region where there are wild animals to which the Jews are not accustomed - big snakes, etc - I shall use the natives, prior to giving them employment in the transit countries, for the extermination of these animals. High premiums for snake skins, etc, as well as their spawn [will be offered by the Jews]. After more than a century of Zionist colonisation and expulsions, Palestinians and their snakes - unfortunately for Israel and its Jewish colonists - remain in the country. Biblical fantasies During the British Mandate, the cruel, colonising British imported South African racist dogs and unleashed them on Palestinian anti-colonial revolutionaries in their dungeons in the late 1930s. The British starved and provoked the dogs before setting them on prisoners to "devour" their flesh. Since 1967, however, the more inventive Israelis have waged veritable animal warfare on Palestinians. Long before the crocodile-guard project, they used dogs, wild boars, sheep, cows, deer, wild asses and birds as instruments of oppression, and continue to do so. Biblical fantasies inspired Avraham Yoffe, a 1948 Israeli army general who later became the first head of the Israel Nature and Parks Authority, to launch what the Israelis called the "return" and "reintroduction" of animal species found in the Bible. In defence of Benjamin Netanyahu Read More » Two such animals were "returned" to Israel - just as Jews have "returned" - from Iran, where both species had continued to exist: the Persian fallow deer and the Asiatic wild ass. The wild ass was introduced into the Naqab between 1982 and 1987 after being gifted to Israel by the shah's zoo in Tehran before the fall of his regime. Four fallow deer, meanwhile, were daringly abducted from the wild and "rescued" by Israel from Iran on the eve of the Islamic Revolution, thereby "saving" them from the new regime. The wild asses, mentioned in the Book of Job, were "reintroduced" into the Naqab and encroached on Palestinian Bedouin camels. Their owners were fined for allowing their camels to drink from customary water sources now reserved for the "returning" asses. In 2018 and 2019 alone, Israel imposed 76 fines totalling 544,300 shekels ($160,000) on Palestinian Bedouin for their camels' trespass onto the new wild ass terrain. As for the fallow deer, their "return" prompted Israel to kill the wild dog population in the Jerusalem hills before reintroducing the deer in 2005. The dogs were recategorised as "feral" to permit their legal "culling" in the name of preserving the deer. Killing Palestinian dogs and expelling Palestinian camels from their home territory is a fate not unlike the one Israel has visited on the Palestinian people themselves, all to make the land biblical and "Jewish again", as Israeli law professor and environmental lawyer Irus Braverman has argued. Weaponising wildlife Israel has also criminalised the popular practice of keeping goldfinches - small birds prized in Palestine and neighbouring Arab countries for their beautiful colours and enticing warbling. But Israel's animal warfare is much more violent than the story of the deer, wild asses and goldfinches. Since 2009, if not earlier, the Israeli settler-colony has weaponised wild boars against Palestinians in the West Bank. It did so again in 2014 and 2022, when Israeli settlers loaded the boars onto trucks and released them near Palestinian communities, which, unlike the gated and illegal Israeli colonies nearby, remain open to boar invasions. The boars have attacked and injured people and livestock while destroying crops. Israel prohibits Palestinians from killing them as they are a protected species. The weaponisation continues. In April 2025, the Israeli army released 18 boars into Iktaba, a besieged Palestinian village near Nur Shams refugee camp in the occupied West Bank. Israel had expelled the camp's inhabitants and begun destroying the camp. The boars were intended to terrorise Palestinians seeking to return home. Besides saving fallow deer from the impending Islamic Republic in 1978, Israel has also sought to save Gaza's donkeys from Palestinian "slavery" while committing genocide against Palestinians. Palestinians in Gaza depend on donkeys and horses for transportation, water delivery, firewood collection, farming, and transporting journalists and aid teams, making the theft of donkeys part of Israel's genocidal efforts. Hundreds of the surviving donkeys were abducted and stolen, as more than 97 percent of Gaza's animal population - including cows, sheep, goats, horses, mules and donkeys - has been obliterated since the genocide began, along with 84 percent of its vegetation. In the West Bank, too, settlers regularly attack, steal and kill Palestinian livestock. An Amnesty International report details this animal warfare against livestock, including Israel's takeover of Palestinian grazing lands. Attack dogs While Palestinian "feral" dogs were killed so Persian fallow deer could make Israel "Jewish" again, European dogs are imported to attack Palestinians and, more recently, rape them. The Netherlands, an enemy of the Palestinian people since 1948, is a major supplier of these racist attack dogs. Israel's Oketz canine unit also imports dogs from other European suppliers and trains them to terrorise civilians. More horrifyingly, Israel has trained these racist dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners, as revealed over the past year Between October 2023 and 2025, Israel carried out at least 146 Oketz attacks, killing Mohammad Bhar, a 24-year-old Palestinian with Down syndrome and autism, in his home, and injuring dozens. Human rights groups have exposed much of this canine warfare. More horrifyingly, Israel has trained these racist dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners, as revealed over the past year. Even The New York Times finally deigned to report on the Israeli-trained rapist dogs, given the scale of the horror. Lest we forget Israeli law's humanity towards wild animals rather than Palestinian animals and humans, the soft-hearted judges of the Israeli Supreme Court were among the first in the world to ban foie gras production in 2003, protecting domesticated geese and ducks from torture by force-feeding. The same court, of course, permits the torture of Palestinians. In 2015, by contrast, Israel legalised the force-feeding of Palestinian hunger strikers in its dungeons, a practice internationally condemned as torture. In this context, Ben Gvir's project to use Nile crocodiles to guard "human crocodiles" is not outrageous but demonstrates Israel's humane love for every animal species except Palestinian "human animals", whom it insists on exterminating - this time by feeding them to Nile crocodiles. The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.