Israel Admits Harvesting Palestinian Organs

Kurt Nimmo
Prison Planet.com
Thursday, December 24, 2009

RELATED: Israel harvested organs in ’90s without consent (Associated Press)

Israel now shares a monstrous distinction with China. It illegally
harvests organs from the dead. The former head of Israel’s Abu
Kabir forensic institute has admitted the ghoulish practice, according
to a reported published by The New Zealand Herald.
Abu Kabir’s forensic pathologists harvested organs from dead
bodies, primarily Palestinians, without the permission of their
families.

Palestinians have feared for many years that Israeli Occupation Forces in the West Bank and Gaza have targeted them for organ harvest.

In August it was reported by Aftonbladet, Sweden’s largest
circulation daily, that Israeli troops killed Palestinians specifically
to harvest their organs. The report appeared after an American Jew was
arrested in the United States for illicit organ trafficking. The story
made news in Israel, where some commentators compared it to medieval
libels that Jews killed Christian children for their blood. Daniel
Seaman, who heads Israel’s government press office, said the
article played on “vile anti-Semitic themes,” according to
the Associated Press.

The Swedish newspaper reported that Israeli soldiers targeted Palestinians specifically in order to harvest their organs.

Journalist Donald Bostrom
wrote in the article that Palestinians “harbor strong suspicions
against Israel for seizing young men and having them serve as the
country’s organ reserve – a very serious accusation, with
enough question marks to motivate the International Court of Justice
(ICJ) to start an investigation about possible war crimes.”

An Israeli official
called Bostrom’s story “hate porn” and the American
magazine Commentary wrote that the story was “merely the tip of
the iceberg in terms of European funded and promoted anti-Israel
hate.”

“The fact is, however, that substantiated evidence of public
and private organ trafficking and theft, and allegations of worse, have
been widely reported for many years. Given such context, the Swedish
charges become far more plausible than might otherwise be the case and
suggest that an investigation could well turn up significant
information,” writes Alison Weir, executive director of If Americans Knew.

The latest accusation was revealed in connection to the Swedish
report. The former head of Abu Kabir forensic institute, Dr Jehuda
Hiss, was interviewed in 2000 by an American academic who released the
interview because of the report in Aftonbladet and the denials of the
Israeli government. “We started to harvest corneas,” Hiss
told the academic. “Whatever was done was highly informal. No
permission was asked from the family.”

“We’d glue the eyelid shut,” Hiss added. “We
wouldn’t take corneas from families we knew would open the
eyelids.”

Israel’s Channel 2 TV aired parts of the interview over the weekend.

In addition to corneas, skin, heart valves, and bones were taken
from the bodies of Israeli soldiers, Israeli citizens, Palestinians and
foreign workers, often without permission from relatives.

Hiss also said skin was taken from the backs of dead Palestinians
and the families of the dead never discovered the theft because they
did not examine the bodies before burial. Muslim custom dictates that
the deceased be buried as soon as possible after death, avoiding the
need for embalming or otherwise disturbing the body.

After the interview aired on television, the Israeli military admitted the macabre practice.

Palestinians have feared for many years that Israeli Occupation
Forces in the West Bank and Gaza have targeted them for organ harvest.

In an article published in the Washington Report on Middle East Affair, Mary Barrett
reports on the killings of young Palestinians. Her report contains an
interview with Dr. Hatem Abu Ghazalch, the former chief health official
for the West Bank under Jordanian administration and director of
forensic medicine and autopsies. Barrett asks Ghazalch about “the
widespread anxiety over organ thefts which has gripped Gaza and the
West Bank since the intifada began in December of 1987.”

“There are indications that for one reason or another, organs,
especially eyes and kidneys, were removed from the bodies during the
first year or year and a half,” Ghazalch responded. “There
were just too many reports by credible people for there to be nothing
happening. If someone is shot in the head and comes home in a plastic
bag without internal organs, what will people assume?”

In 2000, Nancy Scheper-Huges
characterized organ harvesting as a form of modern cannibalism.
“Today, China stands alone in continuing the use of organs of
executed prisoners for transplant surgery,” she wrote.

Now Israel joins China as an international outlaw in this gruesome practice.

Organ harvesting will now be added to the list of Israel’s war
crimes and human rights violations in the Occupied Territories.