The Israeli government has admitted that the practice of organ harvesting did occur in the 1990s, after a recording surfaced in which Dr. Yehuda Hiss, the chief pathologist of the Israeli forensics Institute, described in detail the harvesting of skin, corneas and other organs from Palestinians and Israelis without their family’s consent.The interview, which was recorded in 2000, aired on Israeli Channel 2 over the weekend, and included an admission by Hiss that he and his colleagues tried to cover up what they were doing, saying about corpses that had corneas removed, ‘We’d glue the eyelid shut. We wouldn’t take corneas from families we knew would open the eyelids.’
After the recording came out, the Israeli military admitted that the practice did go on during the 1990s, but said that it hasn’t happened in ten years.
However, no investigation has been done by the Israeli government, and the chief pathologist remains in his position in charge of thousands of dead bodies each year.
In August, a controversial report was published by a Swedish newspaper that quoted Palestinians describing possible organ harvesting by the Israeli government.
Donald Bostrom, the author of the article, was immediately barraged with criticism from Israeli officials and critics around the world, who accused the journalist and the Swedish government of ‘anti-Semitism’.
These accusations have continued in the months since, and have included the former US Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism, who said the accusations of organ harvesting by Israel, is a modern-day equivalent of the infamous Blood Libel, whereby Jews were accused of killing Christian children for their blood.
Even in today’s Huffington Post, an editorial by Rabbi Abraham Cooper calls the accusation of organ theft by Israeli officials a type of ‘pre-genocidal hatred’.
Doctor Mordechai Kedar of Bar-Ilan University in Israel, appeared on Russian television at the time of the initial reports, saying that the Palestinians were liars, and the Swedish journalist was misled:
But now, the Israeli government, which initially dismissed the reports, has been forced to admit that they are true. He said, ‘There’s no way to make sure that this really happened, and they are compulsive liars, those Palestinians.’ He also accused Palestinians of manipulating journalists like Bostrom, who he called ‘naive’.
Alison Weir, with If Americans Knew, one of the first groups in the US to report on the possibility of organ harvesting by Israeli officials, told the IMEMC “The Israeli government’s response to the initial report was so over the top, it made us wonder, why? Why don’t they want anyone to look into this?”
The Israeli government has not said whether they will investigate the issue.
