A multimillion-shekel lawsuit recently filed in the Tel Aviv District Court by an employee of the Institute for Biological Research in Nes Tziona promises to provide a rare glimpse into what transpires behind the walls of one of Israel's most hush-hush institutions.
According to foreign reports, it also develops chemical and biological weapons. One of these reports said institute scientists had developed the poison that was meant to have eliminated Hamas political leader Khaled Meshal in the botched Mossad attack against him in Amman in 1996.
The institute and Shafferman have also been mentioned in connection with the development of a vaccination against anthrax. The problem was that this program, important as it may have been to national security, was born in controversy. More than a decade ago, with the full cooperation of the army and its medical corps, soldiers were volunteered as guinea pigs in experiments on the vaccine.
They participated in these experiments, in complete contravention of the Helsinki Accords, which established rules for medical experiments on human subjects. The demands of these soldiers to be officially recognized as disabled veterans and receive compensation as such were rejected by the defense establishment, and the deliberations in the case continue in court.
Intelligence Online revealed that the institute received a grant of hundreds of millions of dollars from the U.S. government to produce an anthrax vaccine in return for handing over the results to the Americans. These reports intensified suspicions that Israeli soldiers had effectively been "sold" as guinea pigs to serve not only Israeli security interests but also those of foreign powers, in this case the United States.
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