Palestinian chemical weapon threats against Israel? Been there, done that...

Not that it isn't a valid, chilling threat, but we've been in and continue living this movie:

Fatah Aksa Martyrs Brigades' threat on Sunday, that it has succeeded in manufacturing chemical and biological weapons are nothing new.

Despite the bellicose statement, emanating from Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas's own party, which asserted that the weapons were the result of a three-year effort, Palestinians have already used chemical weapons against Israel. Repeatedly.

On some five occasions in the last several years of suicide bombings against Israelis, I recall forensic investigations showing assayable amounts of the pesticide wafarin - that's rat poison - soaked on remains of the bomb casings and shrapnel removed from victims. The pesticide, thankfully, was mostly incinerated when the charge was detonated, limiting the gruesome, hoped-for effects.

Example:

"[Jerusalem Hadassah Hospital's Dr. Avi] Rivkind regularly encounters injuries virtually unseen before: horrific wounds to the head, chest, even rectum, caused by nails, screws and ball bearings flying at high velocity. One suicide bomber sprinkled rat poison among his nuts and bolts, which acts as an often-fatal anticoagulant. “This 14-year-old girl was bleeding uncontrollably from every one of her puncture wounds,” Rivkind says. The doctor managed to stop the bleeding by using a coagulant, still unapproved by the American Food and Drug Administration, which he has since used to treat several other bomb-blast victims."

Example:

"There have been many reports of Hamas operatives planning and preparing attacks incorporating chemicals. Hamas has long sought to increase the lethality of its attacks by lacing shrapnel attached to its suicide bombs with chemicals. Israel’s Health Ministry revealed that nails and bolts packed into explosives detonated by a Hamas suicide bomber in a December 2001 attack at the Ben-Yehuda pedestrian mall in Jerusalem were soaked in rat poison. Furthermore, an interrogation of Hamas military leader Mohammed Abu Tir revealed that on the verge the new millennium, Hamas intended to commit a mass murder of Israelis. The plan, masterminded by Adel Awadallah, then head of Hamas’s military wing in the West Bank, involved the contamination Israeli water resources. In his interrogation, Abu Tir admitted that Awadallah told him that he and others had “reached a high level in producing chemical substances which could cause mass murder if put into the drinking water or swimming pools.”

And let's not forget a foiled plot to poison diners at a popular downtown Jerusalem eatery with a drug "Palestinian plotters hoped would produce heart attack symptoms in Cafe Rimon patrons some 15 hours after eating food laced with toxic quantities of the muscle relaxant Delaxin"

All this, as I'm drinking my morning coffee...

How did Ariel Zilber's wry, classic Israeli pop song go? "We survived Pharoh? We'll survive this, too..."