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| “If such is what they are willing to admit, imagine how much they are concealing,” Knesset member Teibi told IOL. |
OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — For the first time, Israel has tacitly admitted stealing Palestinian body parts for transplant in Jewish patients, vindicating accusations leveled by Palestinians and rights groups over the past years.”We started to harvest corneas…whatever was done was highly informal. No permission was asked from the family,” pathologist Yehuda Hiss, the former head of the Abu Akbar Center, also known as the L. Greenberg Institute for Forensic Medicine, told Nancy Sheppard-Hughes, now a professor of Anthropology at the University of California-Berkeley, in a documentary aired by the Israeli Channel Two.
The documentary revealed that in the 1990s, forensic specialists harvested corneas, heart valves and bones from the bodies of Israeli soldiers, Israeli citizens, Palestinians and foreign workers, often without permission from relatives.
Hiss said his doctors often sought to mask the removal of corneas from bodies.”We’d glue the eyelid shut. We wouldn’t take corneas from families we knew would open the eyelids.”
Other body parts believed to have been harvested from deceased Palestinians and others included heart arteries, bones and corneal tissues.
“The skins were taken from the bodies and transmitted to Hadasah hospital in West Jerusalem on the request of the Israeli army to be transplanted to wounded soldiers and in case of disaster,” said Hiss.
Hiss revealed that in the early 1990s, military surgeons began removing a thin layer of skin from bodies to treat burn victims, which he said was done without family consent.
Hughes reportedly decided to publish the interview, recorded in 2000 as part of her studies at the Israeli forensic institute, after a leading Swedish daily reported in August that Israeli soldiers killed Palestinians to trade in their organs.
A Swedish journalist revealed earlier this year that Israeli doctors at the Abu Akbar forensic institute had been harvesting organs from Palestinians killed by the Israeli army.
The Aftonbladet report, written by Donald Bostrom, cited an incident of Palestinian organ harvesting by Israel in 1992 during the first Intifada.
Incriminating
Ahmed Teibi, a member of the Israeli Knesset and head of the Arab nationalist Party, insists that the new evidence incriminates the Israeli army and government.
“If such is what they are willing to admit, imagine how much they are concealing,” he told IslamOnline.net.
Teibi says the revelations amounted to irrefutable evidence proving that Israeli doctors at the Abu Akbar institute harvested appendages and corneas from bodies of slain Palestinians in the 1990s.
He says the latest revelations underscored the “inherent racism plaguing the Israeli Jewish society.”
Teibi was the first to raise questions about the issue of Palestinian organ harvesting by Israeli doctors.
In January, 2002, then Israeli Health Minister Nessim Dahan said in response to a question by Teibi that he couldn’t deny or confirm that organs of Palestinian youths and children killed by the Israeli army were taken out for transplants or scientific research.
“I couldn’t say for sure that something like that didn’t happen.”
At that time, Teibi said he had received credible evidence proving that Israeli doctors at the forensic institute of Abu Akbar extracted such vital organs as the heart, kidneys and liver from the bodies of Palestinian youth and children killed by the Israeli army in Gaza and the West Bank.
The Israeli military confirmed to the Channel Two documentary that the practice of harvest Palestinian organs took place in the 1990ss.
“This activity ended a decade ago and does not happen any longer.”
Palestinians, however, insist that the Israeli army continued to harvest Palestinian organs for transplant or for sale in the black market.
Earlier this year, relatives of several Palestinians killed by the Israeli army during Al-Aqsa uprising told IOL that their beloved ones were returned to them shortly after they were killed without their vital organs and with a huge cut from the stomach to the neck stitched up. |
Desertpeace 
J.C. Simonin said,
December 21, 2009 at 19:42
Those methods confirm once more that there is no difference whatsoever between National-Socialism and Zionism: The same contempt for the so-called “inferior races”, (Goy, Untermensch) by the “Chosen People” – die Herrenrasse – having conquered the “Promised Land” – das 1.000jährige Reich and presently pushing Eastward – der Drang nach Osten. More similarities could be enumerated. And the world at large looks on and applauds… just as in 1938.
the cook said,
December 21, 2009 at 21:58
this activity ended a decade ago and does noy happen any more,now we use DU munitions and white phosphorous to kill as many civilians as we can.WW2 ended 64 years ago but we still tell the holocaust lie and it is a criminal offence in some nations to deny this event.one lie after another and piling up to rather a large lump.if israel told me it was 2010 next year i would want proof.this nation of chosen killers is responsible for so many atrocities and wars and the world is waking up to the usurpers,lets hope it’s not to late.
zonmoy said,
December 22, 2009 at 02:28
I figure that they are still doing it and probably far worse now. thugs like these need to be locked up. israel should be renamed the israel international prison.
Aufzuleiden / CrazyComposer said,
December 22, 2009 at 16:39
If this is true – if Israel has, in the past, harvested organs from both Palestinians and Israelis without permission – they have done something that is both abominable and, at the same time, profoundly progressive (while being barbaric).
There is a constant and continuous shortage in the medical supply of organs and tissues needed for life-saving transplants. People die every day because they lack something that is a perfect match to them but, due to a ‘lack of consent’, is thrown out and buried – or cremated – with the remainder of the a deceased individual.
I’m not defending the Zionist State in any way here – don’t confuse what I’m writing for an apology for their actions – that is not what these words are intended to convey in any way. However, in countries like Canada and the United States – where people are encouraged to ‘sign their organ donor cards’ there are still thousands upon thousands of deaths that occur every year where viable organs, tissues, and other transplantable ‘things’ are wasted because people want their loved ones buried ‘whole’.
Why? To satisfy some religious or cultural edict? Wouldn’t the saving of other lives be the greater thing that one could do with their life through the donation of organs and tissues, as a final unselfish act, once one had shuffled off this mortal coil? Perhaps most people do not allow themselves the luxury of considering such things as their ultimate posterity, but they should: it does a person good to examine the ideas about what may come of the disposition of one’s body after you have died. One body, if you are in reasonably good health, can help the lives of so many people it boggles the mind: one heart, two lungs (one or two people), two kidneys (two people), and the liver. Then there are the eyes – the corneas – another two people … and then we have the tissues – the skin, and the bones (yes, these are used as well).
The number of lives that can be affected by one body is far more than the three or four that most people consider when they think of when they see the movie with the guy hooked up to the life support machine, waiting for his donor heart to arrive. Unfortunately, people are not usually in a position carefully consider the words of transplant specialists while they are being told that their loved one is in a situation conducive to become an organ donor (i.e. brain dead). Unfortunately, that is why there are so many people waiting for transplants, and why so many people will die without receiving an organ that will go to waste.
Once an individual dies there is no reason in the world why that individual’s organs should not be used for the betterment of society. Citing taboos supported by various religions or cultures is, in a word, foolish. Nothing in Christianity contravenes the donating of one’s organs after death. The body, once life has ceased to energize it, is merely the vessel in which the soul existed (past tense). The fact that it is possible to save lives with one’s body – after having passed from this life – seems to me to be amongst the most charitable acts that one could do, without any cost to the individual (aside from having died). After all, I’ll be dead: what do I need my body for? My faith is sufficient that God will provide me with a new (and improved) body, should one be required, after I have finished with the one that I presently inhabit.
What I am saying is that I believe we should be harvesting organs without asking all the time in the interest of public health. Does that sound barbaric? It wouldn’t if you had a child with some terrible disease and they were waiting for a liver transplant – and they had a 100% chance of dying without one. The transplant lists work … for the lucky few who make it to the top of the lists and then have the luck of having some dreadful accident kill some healthy person who just happens to match their cytochrome profile. Nice. Not.
Not when there are people who die regularly, without having signed their licenses to give consent to transplant their organs … or their families rescind the consent … or cannot give it because ‘they can’t bear to have him cut open’ … and perfectly good organs are buried, and someone who may have lived also dies.
Israel was wrong. 100% wrong. They were deceptive, deceitful and wrong. However … they actually had a good idea – I just wouldn’t trust them in the execution of it (pun intended).
Wie viel ist aufzuleiden!
heidilore said,
December 22, 2009 at 21:56
I hope that the people who have attempted to bring this to light will be vindicated. I ain’t holding my breath, though.