On August 5, 2024, three hundred and three days into their genocidal onslaught on the people of Gaza, the Israeli Occupation returned to Khan Younis the bodies of 89 Palestinians in a shipping container. The living, desperate to identify their loved ones, were met instead with the embodiment of mass death. Decomposed beyond recognition, the corpses retained none of their histories. Were these the bodies of tortured detainees? Were they corpses stolen from bulldozed graves in Gaza? The Occupation refused to say. Without the ability to do DNA testing, Palestinian officials were unable to identify the bodies and had no choice but to bury them, bag by bag, in a single large grave near Nasser Hospital.
Zionist brutality reaches beyond death. For years, the Occupation’s war machine has laid claim to the bodies of Palestinian martyrs, not only holding them hostage, withholding their remains from their families, but also using them to perpetuate schemes of organ theft and trafficking. Israeli doctors, in direct violation of international law, have stolen Palestinian organs and Palestinian skin.
The Zionist entity’s expansionist approach to autopsies is, unsurprisingly, in direct violation of codified medical ethical standards. Take, for instance, the Nuremberg Code for medical research, which emerged in response to egregious cases of experimentation on humans (tortures, really) by Nazi doctors. Or the Declaration of Helsinki for the ethical treatment of human participants in medical research, put forward in 1964 by the World Medical Association. The core principle of both the Code and the Declaration: Any subject participating in human medical research must be able to first provide consent.
This ethical framework is not limited to the living. In 2010, the World Health Organization released separate guiding principles on cell, tissue, and organ transplantation that are rooted in the consent of the donor, whether living or deceased. Additionally, the United Nations’ International Humanitarian Law (Rule 113 and Rule 114 in particular) and The Geneva Conventions codified how the dead are handled, particularly in armed conflict. In sum: The dead must be handled with the utmost dignity, they must remain intact, there can be no mutilation of the body, and the body itself must be handed over without delay.
There exists some debate among medical professionals around how these principles should apply to prisoners of war and convicted criminals. Israel routinely uses these two categories, as well as the category of “terrorist,” to describe Palestinian martyrs in order to justify and excuse the biomedical abuses of martyrs’ bodies. This, too, should come as no surprise.
‘Organs were sold to anyone’
Testimonies of the Israeli state stealing organs from Palestinian bodies have existed over three decades. In 1990, Dr. Hatem Abu Ghazaleh, former chief health official for the West Bank, told a reporter that during the first intifada “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.” But the accounts of Palestinians alone are rarely given credency in international media. It wasn’t until Nancy Scheper-Hughes, an American anthropologist and activist, decided to investigate what she called “the growth of organized transplant tours run by underworld brokers” in Israel that the story began to take shape in the public eye.
In 1999, Scheper-Hughes co-founded Organs Watch, an organization that monitors organ trade and organ traffic and exposes the abuses inherent to both. Within a year, her research on these abuses led her to Israel. While testifying at a U.S. Congressional subcommittee hearing in 2001, Scheper-Hughes said that human rights groups in the West Bank had complained to her about Israeli pathologists stealing tissue and organs from the bodies of Palestinian martyrs.
In 2013, Swedish journalist Donald Boström published an article comprehensively outlining what he called “a troubling history of abuse of dead bodies” brought to the Israeli National Institute of Forensic Medicine during “the crucial and tumultuous period” between the First Intifada and the 2012 war on Gaza.
For most of the period covered in Scheper-Hughes and Boström’s work, the Forensic Institute, also known as Abu Kabir (the name of the ethnically cleansed Palestinian village it’s built upon), was run by director and chief pathologist Dr. Yehuda Hiss. In a July 2000 interview with Scheper-Hughes, Hiss freely admitted to taking skin, bones, cardiac valves, corneas, and other human materials from bodies during autopsies, saying that the families had consented to the autopsies but were not informed of these thefts. He described removing not only corneas but whole eyeballs from the bodies of the dead, which would be returned to their families with their eyelids glued shut.
Dr. Chen Kugel, Hiss’s protege, joined the Institute as a pathologist in 1999. According to Scheper-Hughes it was Kugel who alerted first the Institute’s administration and then the Israeli government about these biomedical abuses, prompting a two-year investigation during which Hiss hid most of the evidence and after which nothing much changed. Kugel, they say, was forced out of his job for speaking up. (Today, Kugel holds Hiss’s former position.)
Kugel told Scheper-Hughes that organs and tissues were, in theory, “taken from everyone, from Jews and Muslims, from soldiers and from stone throwers, from terrorists and from the victims of terrorist suicide bombers, from tourists and from immigrants.” In practice, however, it was easier to steal human materials from those the Zionists perceived to be less than human. “If there were any complaints coming from [Palestinian] families,” Kugel said, “they were the enemy and so, of course, they were lying and no one would believe them.”
In 2002 and again in 2005, Hiss was investigated for removing organs from corpses without familial consent, thefts to which he eventually admitted. After the first investigation, he was reprimanded but allowed to keep his job. After the second, he was removed as director and given a new title — senior pathologist — with a higher salary.
While his government claimed these allegations were antisemitic, Hiss boasted of what he’d done, telling Scheper-Hughes in an interview,
“Now, about the question of harvesting organs — it’s strange. Not only here, in Israel, but elsewhere, it all depends on the personal approach of those in charge of pathology or organ harvesting. In my case, when I was a resident in Tel Hashomer [Hospital] we would collaborate with the army, and we would provide the army with grafted (harvested) skin for burn victims, and, from time to time, they would ask us for cornea. So, I would be involved in it because I was in charge, with two others, and we would provide this.”
In 2010, writing for the leftist magazine CounterPunch, Scheper-Hughes outlined the ethnonationalist justification for the scheme:
“Professor Hiss, viewed by many Israelis and by The New York Times as a hero because of his service to the nation in handling bodies killed by terrorists and suicide bombers, deemed his behavior as patriotic. He was, in his own mind, not so much ‘above the law,’ as representing the law, a much higher law, his law, supremely cool, rational, and scientifically and technically correct. The country was at war, blood was being spilled everyday, soldiers were being burned, and yet Israelis refused to provide tissues and organs needed. So, he would take matters into his own hands.”
Some conservative religious sects in Israel have openly endorsed these actions, manipulating Jewish law to further Jewish supremacist ideology. In 1996, Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh, the influential leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch sect, posed an ostensibly rhetorical question: “If a Jew needs a liver,” he asked, “can you take the liver of an innocent non-Jew passing by to save him? The Torah would probably permit that. Jewish life has infinite value. There is something infinitely more holy and unique about Jewish life than non-Jewish life.”
In her 2014 book Over Their Dead Bodies, former Forensic Institute employee Meira Weiss writes that during the First Intifada, the IOF “allowed [the Institute] to harvest organs from Palestinians using a military regulation that an autopsy must be conducted on every killed Palestinian. Autopsies were accompanied with organ harvest. […] Many of the workers [at the Institute] referred to the First Intifada (1987–1993) as the ‘good days,’ when organ harvesting was conducted consistently and freely compared to other periods.”
Organs weren’t just taken for transplantation and research, but for sale and profit. It is on this point that the defensive accusations of blood libel get louder. When Bostrom, in a 2009 article for the Swedish daily newspaper Aftonbladet, tried to connect the dots between the Forensic Institute’s history of organ theft and Israel’s ascendancy to what Scheper-Hughes calls “the top” of the international organ-trafficking market, there was an international outcry. Yet, to this day, the most alarming things that have been said about the Israeli organ trade have been said by Israelis themselves.
“Organs were sold to anyone; anyone that wanted organs just had to pay for them,” Kugel told Scheper-Hughes. Hearts, brains, and livers were sold for research, for presentations, for drills for medical students and surgeons.
Additionally, according to Kugel, if a client wanted all the organs from a body, that too could be arranged. The total cost: $2,500.
‘Tracing the missing’
The Occupation’s theft of organs is made possible by a wider project of stealing and withholding Palestinian bodies. The hostage remains of Palestinians are often buried in secret graves in Israeli military zones. What Israelis call “the cemeteries of numbers” can only be described as mass graves.
Israel does not always identify bodies before burying them. And on the rare occasion, it returns them, they are often in various stages of decomposition or frozen so solid it would take days for Palestinians to perform their own investigations. In 2016, Dr. Saber Al-Aloul told Al Jazeera that the Occupation returned the bodies of martyrs which had been kept in morgues refrigerated to -35° C. No medical forensic work could be carried out until at least 24 to 48 hours of dethawing, which was often too long for families to wait for answers, so Dr. Aloul and colleagues at Al-Quds University performed autopsies by CT scan instead. In a time of genocide, many methods of ethical autopsy are not available.
“Tracing the missing and identifying the dead are crucial to maintain or restore basic human rights and responsible relief activities,” Doctors Without Borders says in its report, The Practical Guide to Humanitarian Law. It is difficult enough to grieve and process the trauma of loved ones being murdered by an occupying army. It is another question entirely of how to do so when their bodies are held hostage or returned incomplete.
In 2019, the Supreme Court of Israel ruled that the IOF could hold on to the bodies of Palestinian martyrs to use as bargaining chips.
These crimes have been documented by the Jerusalem Legal Aid and Human Rights Center in an 83-page report titled “The Warmth of Our Sons.” The report points out that Israel and Russia are the only states with laws that explicitly permit the withholding of bodies for counterinsurgency purposes.
Palestinian writer and revolutionary Walid Daqqa was held prisoner by the Occupation for 38 years. Despite calls for his release following a cancer diagnosis so he could receive medical treatment, his sentence was extended, and he died in custody in April. His body has yet to be returned to his family. In September, Israel’s High Court ruled that his use in a potential prisoner exchange outweighed the deceased’s right to dignity and his family’s right to a proper burial.
On October 16, the Occupation took the body of Yahya Sinwar, the military and political leader of Hamas, after killing him in battle in Tal Al Sultan, in southern Gaza. It performed a full autopsy, informing the world that Sinwar seemed not to have eaten anything during his last 72 hours. His family did not consent to the theft of his body nor to the autopsy.
Israel even holds the bodies of martyred children. It is often difficult if not impossible under apartheid systems to document who is missing and why, but according to a 2024 report from Defense for Children International, the bodies of 38 children are currently held by the Occupation.
Today, as a ceasefire takes effect, the people of Gaza are either looking for their loved ones under the rubble or waiting for them to be returned on flatbed trucks. When the Occupation is finally held responsible for its war crimes, it must be asked to account for every missing body and body part.
Timeline of Notable Events
2003 – Israeli international organ trafficking network was discovered by police in Durban, South Africa. This network had arranged over 100 illegal transplants for Israeli patients.
2003 – American activist Rachel Corrie was murdered by an Israeli bulldozer. Yehuda Hiss performed Rachel’s autopsy and testified in an Israeli court in 2010 that he kept tissue and organs from her body. Rachel’s family has never gotten the tissues back for burial. It is of note that an autopsy had already been performed and cause of death determined by Palestinian Dr Ahmed Abu Nikera.
2006 – 2009 – Rabbi Levy Izhak Rosenbaum arrested by FBI in Brooklyn, NY for organ trafficking and theft. According to court filings, this organ trafficking ring involved various organs, spanned multiple countries, and employed American doctors working in American hospitals to perform the surgeries.
2007, two doctors, working with Rosenbaum’s partner Ilan Peri, were arrested in Turkey while attempting to take two kidneys from Palestinians to transplant into Israelis. That arrest resulted in shots being fired in the operating room.
2009 – Swedish journalist Donald Boström, published in Aftonbladet, connected the dots between Rosenbaum in America and the Abu Kabir Institute in Israel. Boström stated that the state of Israel was using Palestinian bodies to harvest organs, skin, bones, and other tissues for sale, research, and transplantation. Dr Yehuda Hiss also went on Israeli TV, again fully admitting to and speaking freely about the practice of organ, skin, and bone theft from Palestinians.
2015 – Dr Riyad Mansour (Palestinian Representative to the United Nations) claimed in a series of letters to Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon that Palestinians in Occupied East Jerusalem were returned with missing corneas and organs.
2019 – Authorities in Kazakhstan arrested an Israeli doctor, Abilay Donbay, for organ trafficking. According to authorities, this was a ring that focused on the most poverty stricken and marginalized people from Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
2024 – Wafa News Agency reported more than 100 Palestinian martyrs were returned by the occupation via the Karem Abu Salem crossing and inspected by doctors who reported signs of missing organs. Earlier in November 2024, the occupation stole bodies from Al-Shifa Hospital, as well as from Nasser hospital and from multiple cemeteries in Gaza
This article was written by Aminah Mohammed and Prince X. Neely on behalf of Healthcare Workers for Palestine.
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