Israel has admitted pathologists harvested organs from dead Palestinians, and others, without the consent of their families – a practice it said ended in the 1990s.

Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet reported that the body of a Palestinian man named Bilal Ahmed Ghanem was abducted by Israeli soldiers and returned several days later with a cut from the stomach to the neck that had been stitched up.

The admission, by the former head of the country’s forensic institute, followed a furious row prompted by a Swedish newspaper reporting that Israel was killing Palestinians in order to use their organs – a charge that Israel denied and called “antisemitic.”
The revelation, in a television documentary, is likely to generate anger in the Arab and Muslim world and reinforce sinister stereotypes of Israel and its attitude to Palestinians. Iran’s state-run Press TV reported the story, illustrated with photographs of dead or badly injured Palestinians.

Ahmed Tibi, an Israeli Arab MP, said the report incriminated the Israeli army.

The story emerged in an interview with Dr. Yehuda Hiss, former head of the Abu Kabir forensic institute near Tel Aviv. The interview was conducted in 2000 by an American academic who released it because of the row between Israel and Sweden over a report in the Stockholm newspaper Aftonbladet.

The controversy began when the governments of Israel and Sweden exchanged angry remarks over an article written by David Bostrom entitled “Our Sons Plundered for their Organs” in a Swedish newspaper. Bostrom accused Israelis of organ theft on Palestinians killed by Israeli soldiers during the first intifada in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and called for an international investigation. Israeli officials responded angrily at the newspaper for publishing the material, calling it anti-Semitism that will lead to hate crimes against Jews in Europe, reminiscent of the pogroms.

Channel 2 TV reported that in the 1990s, specialists at Abu Kabir harvested skin, corneas, heart valves and bones from the bodies of Israeli soldiers, Israeli citizens, Palestinians and foreign workers, often without permission from relatives.

The Israeli military confirmed to the program that the practice took place, but added: “This activity ended a decade ago and does not happen any longer.”

Hiss said: “We started to harvest corneas … whatever was done was highly informal. No permission was asked from the family.”

However, there was no evidence that Israel had killed Palestinians to take their organs, as the Swedish paper reported. Aftonbladet quoted Palestinians as saying young men from the West Bank and Gaza Strip had been seized by the Israeli forces and their bodies returned to their families with missing organs. The interview with Hiss was released by Nancy Scheper-Hughes, professor of anthropology at the University of California-Berkeley who had conducted a study of Abu Kabir.

She was quoted by The Associated Press as saying that while Palestinians were “by a long shot” not the only ones affected, she felt the interview must be made public, because “the symbolism, you know, of taking skin of the population considered to be the enemy, [is] something, just in terms of its symbolic weight, that has to be reconsidered.”

Israel demanded that Sweden condemn the Aftonbladet article, calling it an anti-Semitic “blood libel.” Stockholm refused, saying that to so would violate freedom of speech in the country. The foreign minister then cancelled a visit to Israel, just as Sweden was taking over the EU’s rotating presidency.

Hiss was removed from his post in 2004, when some details about organ harvesting were first reported, but he still works at the forensic institute.

Israel’s health ministry said all harvesting was now done with permission. “The guidelines at that time were not clear,” it said in a statement to Channel 2. “For the last 10 years, Abu Kabir has been working according to ethics and Jewish law.”

Bostrom’s story garnered more attention after the indictment of 44 people in New Jersey for money laundering schemes, including Levy-Izhak Rosenbaum for convincing people to give up their kidneys and selling them for $160,000 on the black market.

“That the Israeli government would accuse those who exposed this immoral, illegal and appalling crime of anti-Semitism is evidence of what happens to anyone who dares to criticize any of its actions,” said Muslim Public Affairs Committee Senior Advisor Dr. Maher Hathout. “This tyranny of intimidation is stifling any healthy debate within our society, particularly between American Jews and Muslims.”

What is missing in today’s media reporting is the voice of the Palestinian families who issued the grievances in the first place. After their relatives where killed by Israeli soldiers, the families believed the deceased were taken for autopsies. However, they were returned several days later with noticeable abdominal cavities, stitching of the ventral side of the body, and missing teeth. When they questioned Israeli authorities, they were told that the bodies were investigated on the causes of their unnatural deaths.

Reprinted from The Guardian, December 21, 2009 with additional information from MPAC.