On the morning of March 21, 1983, one week before Pesach, in a high school in the town of Arrabeh in the Jenin area of the West Bank, Palestinian girls (between the ages of 15 and 17) were sitting in several classrooms when they suddenly began to faint, one after the other. They were taken to hospital and checked, but no medical reason was found for their fainting. Yet they had fainted, so a search began in order to find the reason.

Then other girls of the same age began fainting in other villages on the West Bank, in Bethlehem, and afterwards in Hebron and Halhul, Tulkarem and Nablus. Over a period of a few days approximately 1,000 girls ended up in hospital at the same time, seemingly victims of an epidemic.

Since all this occurred just before Pesach, the motif of blood libel and mass poisoning was raised. The rumors began that it was the Israelis who had poisoned the girls...

... After the mass fainting epidemic in 1983, the girls claimed that they had been poisoned, although the doctors who checked them found no evidence of this. Then the Arabs began to make charges that maybe, and then certainly, it was Israelis who had poisoned the girls. They also presented the reason -- the fantastic story that the Jews have an interest in countering the high Palestinian birthrate so they specifically targeted young girls approaching the age of marriage. The poisoning was done to harm this most fertile age group in order to limit Arab demographic growth. They even said they had found medical proof, claiming that urine tests showed a high protein level, which means that something is abnormal in the fertility system.

They began to build all kinds of theories and enlisted statements from Arab doctors. Then, amazingly, the Israeli newspapers began asking why the Jews, who were killed in the gas chambers, would do something like this, and there were calls for an investigation of the actions of the then-Likud government of Menachem Begin. The Arabs saw the Israelis themselves accusing their own government and raised the tone of their accusations even higher.

Baruch Modan, the director-general of the Health Ministry and one of the leading epidemiologists in Israel, headed an investigation team and, of course, found nothing. At a press conference he announced that there was no evidence of poisoning and that this was nothing more than a case of mass hysteria. But in this case the foreign journalists refused to accept the professional opinion of a well-respected doctor.

The Palestinians became bolder and offered still more proof. Yellow powder was found on the window sills. Dr. Modan and his team had checked the powder and found it to be from nearby pine trees, but this did not convince the foreign journalists who kept on saying that the Israelis were guilty.

However, the Israeli media started to backtrack because Dr. Modan is indeed a respected authority. Suddenly a spate of articles began appearing on the history of blood libels and protesting that here, too, on the eve of Pesach, they are acting toward us just as they did in the Middle Ages, with accusations of poisoning the wells. It was amazing -- within ten days the Israeli press went from self-accusation to massive self-defense...