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 – it emerged at the
weekend.
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 tonight 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.
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 programme 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 antisemitic "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."
• This article was amended on 21 December 2009. The headline
was changed as it did not reflect accurately the contents of the
story. Nancy Scheper-Hughes's name was misspelled as Nancy
Sheppard-Hughes in the original text.
