For most of the 20th century, governments of the Middle East waged war against malaria. The eradication of malaria was touted as the modern nation's struggle against a primordial scourge. In Israel/Palestine, one scholar has described this struggle as "healing the land" in the eyes of its proponents. Scholarship on Turkey emphasizes the biopolitical dimensions of the new Republic's sometimes paternalistic approach to public health, which involved medical interventions into the lives of peasants while waging a "war on malaria." The fixation on geography or backwardness of peasants belied more recent proximate factors also contributed to disease risk, however enduring and old the presence of malaria may have been in the Middle East. This paper examines how the prevalence of malaria in the Middle East grew markedly during the First World War period. Displacement, famine, and sudden shortages of medical supplies in the particularly vulnerable Ottoman Empire all contributed to the spread of malaria. As the breakdown of the late Ottoman public health regime left the populace vulnerable, the movements of refugees and soldiers further provided the means of malaria's spread. As I argue, the presence and virulence of malaria in post-Ottoman nation-states and mandates was in part a lasting legacy of the First World War that would affect local societies for decades after the fighting had stopped.