In an attempt to smear Israel and justify his organization’s prolonged terrorist campaign against it, Hamas official Osama Hamdan claimed on Lebanese television that Jews have “become addicted to” killing children and women. He also argued it was “not a figment of imagination” that Jews used Christian blood in their Passover bread.
“The Israelis concentrate on killing children,” he said. “I believe that this is engraved in the historical Zionist and Jewish mentality, which has become addicted to the killing of women and children.”
“We all remember how the Jews used to slaughter Christians in order to mix their blood in their holy matzos,” he continued. “This is not a figment of imagination or something taken from a film. It is a fact, acknowledged by their own books and by historical evidence.”
Hamdan is speaking of blood libel, which has been a pretext to slaughter Jews for centuries in Europe. He says their own books and evidence acknowledge it, but if he actually read the books, he would see the Ten Commandments in the Torah forbids murder. Additionally, the use of any blood is not allowed in kosher dietary laws. For meat to be kosher, the animal must be drained of all its blood, and no human can consume it. Magen Tzedek reports:
Eating blood is forbidden. Blood is blood, whether it comes from a human being or an animal. In prohibiting the consumption of blood, the Torah seems to be concerned that it can excite a blood-lust in human beings and may desensitize us to the suffering of human beings when their blood is spilled. In the passage in which the prohibition against eating “flesh with its life-blood in it” is first found, we also see the prohibition against murder: “Whoever sheds the blood of man/By man shall his blood be shed” (Genesis 9:6). Because life–even an animal life–is sacred and “the life of the flesh is in the blood” (Leviticus 17:11), the blood of animals must not be eaten; it must be disposed of carefully.
It may shock Hamdan, but over the centuries, the Catholic Church and other sects of Christianity found no evidence of blood libel and concluded it was a myth to deny Jews freedom and seize their property. One of the earliest findings of the myth was from Pope Innocent IV in 1247.
Hamdan did not accuse the IDF soldiers of using the blood of Palestinian women and children to make bread, but it is definitely implied. It was Islamic Jihad spokesman Daoud Shihab who told Lebanon television the IDF soldiers used the blood.
“I would just like to remind you of the ruling by the Israeli rabbis, who have instructed the soldiers to knead the bread that the Jews eat with the blood of Arab and Palestinian children,” he said.
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