The Long Shadow of Allegation: Israel, Palestine, and the Controversy Over Organ Theft

For more than two decades, a disturbing accusation has hovered over one of the world’s most intractable conflicts. Claims that Israeli authorities or military forces have harvested organs from dead Palestinians, a charge rejected by Israel as slanderous, have surfaced again and again, each time reigniting outrage, suspicion, and diplomatic tension. The allegations sit at the intersection of war, medicine, and morality, touching on some of the deepest wounds in the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. A new report from Novara Media has reignited the sensitive and long-overdue debate surrounding Israel’s illegal organ trade. 

Gazan authorities have formally accused Israel of systematically harvesting organs from Palestinian detainees, claiming that bodies returned under the recent ceasefire were found mutilated and missing eyes, corneas, and internal organs. The message echoes long-standing claims of Israeli “necroviolence”, the desecration and exploitation of Palestinian corpses, a practice human rights monitors have documented intermittently over decades.

Early Accusations and the Abu Kabir Scandal.

The roots of the controversy trace back to the 1990s, when Israel’s main forensic facility, the Abu Kabir Institute of Forensic Medicine, became the focus of scrutiny. In the late 1990s, its longtime director, Dr Yehuda Hiss, was accused of authorising the removal of corneas, skin, heart valves, and bones from the bodies of Israelis, Palestinians, and foreign nationals without family consent.

A 2009 interview with Hiss, broadcast by Israel’s Channel 2 and cited by Al Jazeera, confirmed that such unauthorised removals had occurred. Hiss claimed the practice had ended around 2000, while Israel’s Ministry of Health later acknowledged ethical violations but insisted they were neither targeted nor systematic. However, according to Ahmed Tibi, an Israeli Palestinian member of parliament, who was quoted in a December 2009 report by Al Jazeera, claimed that he had evidence indicating that organ theft was ongoing. He pointed to the case of Fadul Ordul Shaheen, a diabetic man from Gaza who passed away in 2008. His body, which the Israeli had returned to his family, revealed an unexplainable “deep cut through his body.”

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Yet the story did not end there. In August 2009, the Swedish daily Aftonbladet published a damning article alleging that the Israeli army had killed young Palestinian men and returned their bodies with missing organs. The report triggered an international uproar. Israel condemned the piece as a “blood libel,” invoking the anti-Semitic myths of medieval Europe, while Sweden defended its press freedom. No independent evidence ever substantiated the claims, but the controversy embedded itself deeply in the collective memory of the conflict.

On January 29, 2010, Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations Secretary General, received a written statement from the International Organisation for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (EAFORD), a non-governmental organization in special consultative status, warning the UN about Israel’s illegal trafficking in organs of dead and kidnapped Palestinian victims.

DOCUMENT: Written statement submitted to the United Nations by the International Organization for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (EAFORD) Israeli Illegal Trafficking in Organs of dead and kidnapped Palestinian victims – 29 January 2010 (Source: United Nations)
EAFORD Statement to UN

Interestingely, in its 2015 report titled “Trafficking in Human Organs”, the EU Directorate-General for External Policies Policy Department asserts that, “since the year 2000, trafficking in organs has seemingly started to spread globally, to a large extent driven by Israeli doctors and patients who explore opportunities to seek transplantation in Eastern European countries and Russia.

Renewed Claims Amid War

The accusations resurfaced during periods of heavy violence. In 2015, the Palestinian Authority’s representative to the United Nations charged that Israel was “harvesting organs” from the bodies of Palestinians killed by its security forces. Israel’s ambassador dismissed the statement as “outrageous and anti-Semitic,” but the claim resonated widely across Arab and social media platforms. In a letter dated November 4, 2015, sent to the United Nations, Riyad Mansour, Ambassador Permanent Observer of the State of Palestine to the UN, accuses Israel of harvesting the organs of deceased Palestinians.

Since the outbreak of the Gaza war in 2023, the allegations have taken on renewed urgency. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a Geneva-based NGO, reported that Israeli forces had “confiscated dozens of corpses” from hospitals in Gaza, returning some with missing organs, including livers, kidneys, and corneas. In the aftermath of Israeli withdrawals from southern Gaza in early 2024, Palestinian rescue teams in Khan Younis said they found bodies in mass graves with tied hands, open abdomens, or stitched wounds inconsistent with normal autopsy practices.

By October 2025, Gaza’s health authorities accused Israel of returning corpses that were blindfolded, bound, and “missing vital organs.” They called for an international investigation under UN supervision, describing the alleged acts as “a barbaric violation of human dignity and international law.” Israel has categorically rejected all such claims, denouncing them as propaganda designed to inflame anti-Israeli sentiment.

Earlier this year, Mondweiss published a detailed report titled “A brief history of Israel’s theft and trafficking of Palestinian organs”, written by Aminah Mohammed and Prince X. Neely, on behalf of Healthcare Workers for Palestine. A version of the article was published on New York War Crimes.
New York Crimes

The Role and Silence of International Organisations

Despite the magnitude of these accusations, no United Nations body has yet released a formal report substantiating systematic organ harvesting by Israeli forces. UN inquiries and human-rights reports have documented a wide range of potential violations in Gaza, including attacks on hospitals, obstruction of medical access, and the mistreatment of detainees. Still, they have not verified claims of organ theft.

A 2024 UN Commission of Inquiry report focused on the deliberate targeting of Gaza’s healthcare system, calling such actions potential war crimes, yet the document made no reference to organ removal. Similarly, major NGOs such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have not produced evidence confirming the practice, though they have urged transparency in Israel’s handling of Palestinian bodies.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, however, has repeatedly called for a forensic investigation, arguing that the condition of returned corpses raises “grave suspicions” of organ extraction. The organisation has demanded that Israel allow international medical experts to inspect remains and document findings independently, a request Israel has thus far ignored.

On the Israeli side, officials maintain that any insinuation of a state-sanctioned organ-harvesting policy is a revival of historic anti-Jewish libels. Israeli spokespersons note that the Abu Kabir scandal involved both Israeli and non-Israeli cadavers and occurred decades ago under civilian, not military, authority.

A Battle of Narratives

The absence of verifiable evidence has left the issue suspended between competing narratives. For Palestinians, the allegations symbolise a broader pattern of dehumanisation, the withholding of bodies, the desecration of graves, and the denial of burial rites. For Israelis, the charge represents an echo of medieval blood libels, a moral weapon wielded to delegitimise the state and its army.

What is indisputable, however, is that thousands of Palestinian corpses remain in Israeli custody, some held in so-called “cemeteries of numbers”, anonymous burial sites where identification and autopsy records are opaque. The lack of transparency, coupled with Israel’s tight control over forensic access in war zones, has made independent verification nearly impossible.

Even human-rights groups sympathetic to the Palestinian cause acknowledge the evidentiary gap. “The conditions of war and restricted access make rigorous forensic investigation almost unachievable,” Euro-Med noted in a 2023 briefing, urging international oversight before drawing conclusions.

Ethics, Law, and the Need for Clarity

If proven, the forced removal of organs from deceased individuals would constitute a grave breach of international humanitarian law. Under the Geneva Conventions, parties to a conflict must respect the dead, prevent mutilation, and ensure the dignified handling of remains. The World Health Organisation’s guidelines on organ transplantation also forbid any procurement of organs without explicit consent or lawful authority.

Israel has yet to ratify the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, which requires honouring the dignity of the deceased and forbids the looting or mutilation of corpses.

In an article published by the French outlet Le JD, lawyer Aurélien Veil explains that it is impossible to harvest organs from a deceased person, as they begin to decompose immediately. He adds that “the myth claiming Israel harvests organs from Palestinians is a modern reincarnation of the ancient accusation of ritual murder.” His remark followed a post on X from French MP Rima Hassan from La France insoumise (LFI), who relayed information from the British media outlet Novara Media, which claims that the Israeli army has stolen organs from Palestinian bodies over the past thirty years “for profit, transplantation and research purposes”.

But absent definitive forensic evidence, the allegations remain unresolved, a moral question that continues to haunt the political battlefield. Calls for an impartial, international investigation have grown louder, yet none has yet been authorised.

Until such an inquiry takes place, the accusation will remain both an open wound and a weapon, a symbol of mistrust in a conflict where truth, like life, is all too often lost amid the rubble. Novara Media has the story…

Freddie Ponton
21st Century Wire

IMAGE: Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor has called for the creation of an independent international investigation committee into organ theft suspicions. (Source: Euromed Monitor)

Harriet Williamson reports for Novara Media…

Israeli Military Accused of Palestinian Organ Theft Again – Not for the first time.

Israel has been formally accused of systematic organ theft by Gazan authorities, after the bodies of Palestinian detainees handed over by Israel as part of the ceasefire deal were allegedly missing eyes, corneas and internal organs. While this may seem sensational or far-fetched at first glance, Israeli organ theft and necroviolence – defined as violence performed through the offensive treatment of corpses – against Palestinians is not a new concept. 

Accusations and evidence of Israeli doctors harvesting Palestinian organs for profit, transplantation and research stretch back more than three decades and can be viewed as part of Israel’s wider treatment of Palestinians, an occupied people who are afforded little dignity in death as in life.

On 17 October, Gaza government media office director Dr Ismail al-Thawabta accused the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) of stealing organs from Palestinian corpses and called for an immediate international investigation “to hold Israel accountable for serious violations against the bodies of the martyrs and the theft of their organs”.

Of the 120 Palestinian corpses returned through the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) over three days, al-Thawabta said bodies were missing parts including cochleas, corneas, livers and other organs, and that this confirmed the IDF “stole human organs while holding the bodies”.

According to the Mizan News Agency in Iran, Israel categorically denies these accusations.

The bodies were released as part of US President Donald Trump’s so-called ‘Gaza peace plan’ after two years of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza killed a conservative estimate of 68,000 Palestinians. The first phase came into force on 10 October and includes a fragile ceasefire that Israel has breached more than 80 times.

Hamas released the 20 remaining living Israeli hostages and the remains of at least 10 dead hostages, in exchange for approximately 2,000 Palestinian detainees who were held in Israeli prisons – many without charge or trial.

Al-Thawabta also said “most [bodies] arrived in deplorable condition, showing evidence of field executions and systematic torture”. His description of the condition of returned Palestinian bodies is consistent with reported findings of other doctors: evidence of strangulation, hands and feet bound with plastic ties, blindfolds, detainees shot in the head at close range, signs of severe physical torture such as “fractures, burns and deep wounds” and bodies clearly “crushed under the tracks of Israeli tanks”.

Digging up mass graves.

Prior to the 10 October ceasefire, Israel was holding 735 Palestinian bodies – including 67 children’s corpses – according to the Palestinian National Campaign to Retrieve Martyrs’ Bodies. As of 23 October, Israel has repatriated 195 bodies of Palestinians to Gaza, but only 57 Palestinian families have managed to identify their loved ones.

Just days earlier, it was reported that 135 bodies of Palestinians had been returned from notorious torture prison Sde Teiman, a military base in the Negev desert, where Palestinians are imprisoned without charge or trial and subjected to cruel and inhuman treatment such as being held in cages, blindfolded, handcuffed, shackled to hospital beds and forced to wear nappies. The bodies of Palestinians were handed back mutilated.

The treatment of the deceased is at least partially covered by international law, and mutilation of corpses – which includes the non-consensual harvesting of organs – is a clear violation.

In armed conflict, the Fourth Geneva Convention states that all parties must take all possible measures to prevent the dead from being despoiled, and mutilation of dead bodies is prohibited.

The UN principles regarding extra-legal, arbitrary or summary executions require the bodies of deceased persons be preserved and protected for investigation, while the UN’s Minnesota Protocol requires special care and attention in the recovery and handling of human remains. According to the Human Rights Committee, disrespectful treatment of human remains may also amount to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of the deceased’s family.

In November 2023, two months into Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor tracked the IDF’s confiscation of dozens of dead bodies from the al-Shifa medical complex, the Indonesian hospital in the north of Gaza and others from around Salah al-Din Road – including by digging up mass graves. Some bodies were handed over to the ICRC but many, Euro-Med Monitor said, were kept by the Israeli army.

According to the rights group, medical professionals in Gaza who examined some of the bodies after they were released found evidence of organ theft, including “missing cochleas and corneas as well as other vital organs like livers, kidneys and hearts”.

While doctors said it was impossible for them to conduct full analytical examinations of the bodies due to being under fire by the IDF and dealing with an influx of wounded civilians, they still detected “several signs of possible organ theft by the Israeli military”.

In January 2024, CNN reported IDF attacks on 16 cemeteries in Gaza and in the same month, Euro-Med Monitor stated that at least 12 cemeteries had been targeted by the IDF, deliberately bulldozing and desecrating hundreds of graves, and stealing and dismembering bodies. This followed a New York Times report on the IDF razing Gaza’s cemeteries without military justification – which constitutes a war crime.

January 2024 also saw at least 100 Palestinian bodies buried in a mass grave in Rafah after the IDF took them from hospitals and cemeteries in Gaza. Medical sources said that upon inspection, some bodies had organs missing.

In April 2024, the desecration of Palestinian bodies was highlighted again, this time in a statement from the Gaza Ministry of Religious Affairs, which accused the IDF of mass corpse mutilation, including carrying out postmortem decapitations and dismemberment. It described the IDF throwing bodies into a large pit and covering them in garbage, and said this practice was “documented in al-Shifa medical complex, Nasser medical complex and Kamal Adwan hospital”.

The Forensic Institute scandal.

Israeli government officials have admitted that Israel harvested the skin, corneas, heart valves and bones of Palestinians, Israelis and foreign workers in the 1990s – often without permission.

This shocking admission in 2009 came after state pathologist and director of the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Abu Kabir, Professor Yehuda Hiss, gave an interview to Nancy Scheper-Hughes, a professor of anthropology at the University of California-Berkeley, in 2000. Scheper-Hughes had helped to found the Berkeley Organs Watch project a year previously.

In the interview, Hiss was open about organ harvesting on behalf of the Israeli state, saying: “We started to harvest corneas .. whatever was done was highly informal. No permission was asked from the family.”

The Israeli organ harvesting story was picked up by Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet, which included allegations of young Palestinian men disappearing from villages in Gaza and the West Bank, particularly highlighting the case of Bilal Ahmad Ghanem, who was killed by Israeli soldiers in 1992. Writer Donald Boström described “meeting parents who told of how their sons had been deprived of organs before being killed” and the bodies of young men being returned by the IDF for burial with slits from the abdomen to the chin.

Boström reported that relatives of the young men told him, “Our sons are used as involuntary organ donors.”

The Aftonbladet article linked the alleged theft of young Palestinian men’s organs to Israel’s historic shortage of organ donors – and the well-documented role of Israelis in the global illegal organ trade. In 2003, an international organ trafficking network was uncovered by police in South Africa, with Israelis as the beneficiaries of illegal transplants.

In the media firestorm that followed, Boström was accused of antisemitism and “blood libel”.

In response, Scheper-Hughes decided to publish the transcript of her 2000 interview with Hiss in CounterPunch magazine, showing that Hiss readily admitted to the non-consensual tissue, skin, bone and organ harvesting to serve the needs of the state of Israel.

When a tape of Scheper-Hughes’ interview with Hiss was released to Israel’s TV Channel 2, the Israeli military said: “This activity ended a decade ago and does not happen any longer.”

Hiss also admitted in court to performing a second autopsy on American activist Rachel Corrie, who was killed by an Israeli bulldozer in 2003, and keeping tissue and organs from her body.

Hiss’s protegee, Dr Chen Kugel, who ended up whistleblowing on the Forensic Institute, also told Scheper-Hughes that although organs and tissues were, in theory, taken from everyone, in practice, it was easier to steal organs from the occupied Palestinian population. Kugel said: “If there were any complaints coming from [Palestinian] families, they were the enemy and so, of course, they were lying and no one would believe them.”

Parliamentary hearings were held in Israel’s Knesset in December 2009 where health officials testified that Israeli authorities had stolen the organs of dead Palestinians and Israelis a decade previously for transplant purposes. However, Palestinian-Israeli politician Ahmed Tibi testified in the Knesset that organ theft had continued, citing the case of Fadul Ordul Shaheen, a Palestinian from Gaza who died of diabetes in 2009.

“When his body was given back to his family, his eyes were bleeding, and there was a deep cut through his body,” Tibi said. “The family is saying that both the corneas and the kidneys were taken. I am asking you if you’re willing to look into this complaint and see if this activity is continuing, if organs are being harvested from Palestinian prisoners.”

Israel’s deputy health minister at the time, Yaacov Litzman, said the case would be investigated “with all seriousness”. Novara Media could find no available information about the outcome of an investigation or if one had taken place.

Allegations of Israeli organ theft stretch back even further, to the First Intifada, which began in 1987. Another former Forensic Institute employee, Meira Weiss, wrote in her 2014 book Over Their Dead Bodies that the IDF “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 by organ harvest.”

Weiss also stated that many Forensic Institute workers “referred to the First Intifada as the ‘good days’, when organ harvesting was conducted consistently and freely compared to other periods”.

Continue reading this report here.

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Source: https://21stcenturywire.com/2025/11/03/the-long-shadow-of-allegation-israel-palestine-and-the-controversy-over-organ-theft/