Israel, Mishegas

Israel Admits to Harvesting Organs in 1990's

“The article was a shocking piece of blatant racism,” Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said of a Swedish journalist’s report that Israel was harvesting organs from Palestinians. Charges of European anti-Semitism and revived blood libels exploded. The journalist in question, Donald Bostrom, reiterated to the press that he had no specific evidence of present-day kidnappings and organ harvesting, but called for inquiries into numerous claims such happened in the 1990s.
This weekend, the Israeli Defense Forces spokesperson confirmed the rumor after an interview with a head Israeli researcher was broadcast on Israel’s Channel 2 news. From JTA:

The admission came after the release of a 2000 interview with Dr. Yehuda Hiss, who was the head of Israel’s L. Greenberg Forensic Institute in Abu Kabir, The Associated Press reported.
Hiss told an American academic in the interview, parts of which were broadcast on Israel’s Channel 2 over the weekend, that the institute used corneas from bodies, including Israeli soldiers, Palestinians and foreign workers. Channel 2’s report said that corneas, heart valves, skin and bones were used from the corpses without families’ permission.

I’m going to forgo more commentary presently, because I’m a little sick in the stomach, both from that this actually happened and because of the fuel this gives to our haters.

40 thoughts on “Israel Admits to Harvesting Organs in 1990's

  1. Can’t believe people are making such a huge deal about this, it’s not like we used it to make Matzah or anything.

  2. I care! My home federation (if I could say such a thing) in Seattle was shot up (1 died, 5 injured) during Operation Cast Lead by a man upset over Israel’s brutality in Gaza. People I know work in that building and I nearly had a job for the AJC in Seattle. In a slight turn of my life’s events, it could have been me shot.
    I admit to being generally dismissive to passive anti-Semitism, but this is an especially disgusting act.

  3. J1-
    the victims of their crimes. It’s not about appeasing haters, it’s about self-preservation and protection. If you don’t do ridiculous things like harvest organs from people’s dead bodies like you have a right to then people can’t say you do ridiculous things like harvest organs from people’s dead bodies like you have a right to. Believe it or not, there are people who will kill Jews because of this ridiculous, heinous behavior that, like it or not, the world interprets as done in our name.
    Part of me wants to be as mature as KFJ and withhold statements until further information becomes available, but this type of news items is part and parcel of a) why I stopped reading the news, and b) divorced myself from Israel. Gross and despicable is what this is. This is the sh!t out of Grimm Bros. stories. Couple this with decapitating Palestinians in Gaza, driving their head onto a stake and photographing yourself next to it with a cigarette in its mouth, and well, good luck convincing any Arab youth that Israel wants them to have a normal, peaceful existence.

  4. Who cares what our haters think?
    We should care what the haters think to the point that they are offering coherent criticism. Dismissing someone because they hate does not disprove their points of contention.
    There is a difference between criticizing Jewish behavior that is xenophobic and/or irrational/Holocaust obsession driven, and that which is conspiracy theory nonsense.
    As the Yiddish proverb says,
    “Listen to your enemies, because it is God talking.”
    I think it is very Jewish to listen to one’s enemies.
    Certainly, not all would agree, Look at the frummies. They usually don’t listen to anyone. All criticism is dismissed as “Ortho-bashing.”
    What makes an organization like NCSY so capable despite massive problems is that they started listening. Rabbi Burg is a capable and formidable opponent. If only he would have been like the rank and file who preceded him, and continued to dismiss the concerns of secular and Liberal Jews like myself as “Ortho-bashers,” it would be a lot easier to route that predatory organization.
    Instead, in the form of early chit-chat, Rabbi Burg warned me that I am not dealing with that sort of person. He told me that he was finishing a biography on Eisenhower, the greatest 20th century general to become president. His message: “I will defeat you, because I am listening to you and empathizing with you. Your greatest advantage — that the frummies don’t listen nor empathize, will not be the case with me. You are one person with limited time, and virtually zero financial resources. Perhaps you should go after a more tone-deaf opponent.”
    My best hope is that the OU itself and its ultra-Orthodox partners will restrain Burg’s ability to act on what he hears. But the fact is, NCSY is protecting and expanding its mission to make as many secular and Liberal Jews Orthodox–and as Orthodox as possible — precisely because R. Burg “listens to his enemies.”
    So, Jonathan1 — do you advocate being like Kung Fu Jew and Rabbi Burg, who listen to their opponents, or do you advocate being like the whiny frummies who dismiss every criticism as “Otho-bashing” as resistance and resentment to their agenda builds and builds?

  5. So, Jonathan1 — do you advocate being like Kung Fu Jew and Rabbi Burg, who listen to their opponents, or do you advocate being like the whiny frummies who dismiss every criticism as “Otho-bashing” as resistance and resentment to their agenda builds and builds?
    Ironically, I’m not the person who wrote: I’m going to forgo more commentary presently, because I’m a little sick in the stomach, both from that this actually happened and because of the fuel this gives to our haters.
    I kind of think that KFJ means that there are people out there who hate Jews/Israel no matter what, and they will use things like organ harvesting to strengthen their cause of hating Jews/Israel. I don’t think the “our haters” to whom he is referring are offering any coherent criticms of Jews/Israel–as opposed to secular and/or Liberal Jews criticizing NCSY.
    So, I guess I’m trying to say that some people will hate us no matter what, so we shouldn’t really care what they think.

  6. and because of the fuel this gives to our haters
    And, btw, I went to a Breaking the Silence presentation in Israel a few years ago, and one of the speakers got this exact question. He was asked if he was concerned that, through his work, he was giving material to Israel’s haters.
    His response: some people will hate us no matter what, whatever we do.

  7. it’s about self-preservation and protection. If you don’t do ridiculous things like harvest organs from people’s dead bodies like you have a right to then people can’t say you do ridiculous things like harvest organs from people’s dead bodies like you have a right to.
    Nobody ever falsely accused Jews of doing ridiculous things, even before the First Aliyah?

  8. Popular sentiment of reasonable people with no particular beef against Jews rises and falls depending on current events. Public studies show that American sympathy to Israel/Jews rises when she’s under terrorist attack and falls when Israel counterattacks brutally. It’s my mistake the use the word “haters” because that implies we care about the anti-Semites who hate us and not reasonable people who hate our policies or their effects.

  9. I remember back in 1988, news started to trickle out that the IDF had ‘buried Palestinian alive with a bulldozer.’ This image, of a ditch with live people getting covered up by a vehicle with IDF tags was sort of horrifying to people. There was a real sense of shock and outrage, not just among human rights advocates.
    Si Hyman (where is she now?) wrote a song within days that featured this lyric:
    When did we learn how to bury people alive?/ When did we forget that our children have also been killed?
    (http://www.nytimes.com/1988/09/11/arts/jerusalem-artists-arab-and-jew-find-the-palestinian-uprising-an-uneasy-subject.html?pagewanted=1)
    So back then, I remember how that song could stop people on the street. Army radio played it once, and then it was banned.
    Will there be a song about how officials of the state of Israel harvested organs of people it may have killed – a Middle East version of China? Probably not. But if there would be, it would not have the capacity to shock the Israel public, or supporters of Israel abroad.
    The past few decades have seen such an escalation in brutality and corresponding willingness to defend it. So when an allegation that appears on the surface to be false (Baby killing? Shitting on desks? Calling an air-strike on a school? Posing with dead bodies who have had a ciggie stuck in the lips? Sending soldiers to die in the last day before a ceasefire without a clear goal? General leaves war room to sell stock in advance of orders to troops? Starvation approved as official policy? Imprisonment of children without a trial? Murdering Arafat? Collaborating with Columbian narco-terrorists? Helping Apartheid South Africa develop nukes? IDF handing out religious pamphlets justifying mass murder? And finally, harvesting organs…) then we now have to conclude that the allegation is quite probably correct until proven false.
    The automatic sense that it’s probably a crazed Israel hater inventing crap is gone forever. Official denials only prove the point. The anti-Semitism of false, insane charges against a weak and defenseless people has been replaced with the anti-Semitism of true, logical charges against a powerful, militaristic people who for the most part approve of or respond with ‘meh’ to the most horrific crimes.
    Thanks Israel. I actually preferred the old kind of anti-Semitism. Please, for the love of god, will you please stop being a ‘Jewish’ state?

  10. some people will hate us no matter what, so we shouldn’t really care what they think.
    Some people will love us no matter what . . .

  11. Nobody ever falsely accused Jews of doing ridiculous things, even before the First Aliyah?
    This is not false! This is real! I’m disturbed that you’re not disturbed that a country you hold allegiance to thinks it is acceptable to harvest organs from dead bodies. Can you explain why this is okay?

  12. Where did I write that I’m not disturbed, Justin? I am.
    I just took issue with one specific point that KFJ wrote, and the comments that related to that specific point.

  13. I also don’t want to jump to conclusions that Israelis aren’t abhored by this — the practice was stopped a decade ago. Perhaps it was conducted without authorization, perhaps it was halted by an Israeli of supreme ethics, who knows. Sure as it’s disgusting, we have no idea who was responsible and if they’re still in authority.
    Hold your horses, folks.

  14. CNN provides some more context and information.
    I don’t know how many of you are in the medical field, or follow medical ethics, so let me say that what happened in Israel, and what apparently stopped “a decade ago”, is actually quite common. Countries like Sweden, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland and France (and soon the UK) have all passed “presumed consent” laws with respect to organ donation. “Presumed consent” means that, unless you specifically dissent from organ donation in your lifetime, you are presumed to consent to organ harvesting upon clinical death.
    This is why the Abu Kabir forensic institute did not discriminate between Jews, Arabs, or foreign workers. It appears there was simply a lack of clarity in law, policy or the implementation of that policy as it concerns “presumed consent”.
    Presumed consent is the law in Israel. However, it’s not a simple as that. The law is different in various countries. Let’s say someone did not dissent during their lifetime. Upon death, should their spouse be allowed to make that decision? Should their kids? Should their cousin, third removed? Their friend? In some countries, practically anyone with any close connection to the deceased can dissent on their behalf, the idea being that they would know the wishes of the deceased.
    Remember, also, that medical professionals in the field of organ transplant face a ghastly task of watching a substantial portion of their patients succumb to organ failure. In a country like Israel, with one of the lowest organ donation rates in the world (8 donations for every million people, compared to 34 in Spain), the administration may have felt that fudging already unclear laws or policies in order to save lives, or restore sight or mobility to living human beings was a simple moral choice.
    The most important point that all of us should understand, is that despite our personal feelings about the state of Israeli law or medical ethics policy, or the improper actions of the Abu Kabir institute’s administration (people were disciplined, after all), this story has nothing to do with the vile accusations hurled, without any substantiation, by a Swedish newspaper some months ago, that the IDF was murdering people in order to harvest their organs. That’s NOT what this particular case was about.
    Frankly, what happened – a lack of clarity or proper enforcement of protocol in the medical setting – is something that happens more frequently than most realize, whether in organ harvesting or other areas. For example, how many prescriptions were improperly filled to Palestinians by Israeli physicians last year? Thousands, I’m sure, some of them leading to illness and death. We wouldn’t turn that into “Israel poisons, murders Palestinians”, would we? On the off chance that some here would, I’ll give some context. In the US, 1.5 million people are injured by prescription errors every year. These kinds of issues occur in every major medical community. The issue was resolved, the law or policy clarified and enforced, as it should have been. Yes, the nature of harvesting organs from lifeless bodies is an unpleasant concept for most peole, no matter how it’s done. To turn this into a political matter, much less a diplomatic one, or to denounce the “Jewish” character of the State of Israel as a result is completely out of proportion.

  15. Avidgor, you bring up some good points. But the presumed consent is in cases when the person dies in an accident or from natural causes. not shellings and air raids.

  16. Justin, I would assume so, but I’ve never heard of such a thing. That’s a very interesting point. Could an army harvest organs from dead enemy soldiers? I know some here would faint at the sight of blood, but this is actually a very practical question. What would be the argument behind, “we are allowed to kill them, but we can’t take their liver to save one of our own”? I honestly don’t know if the laws of war address this issue. Perhaps there is a protocol on not mutilating bodies, and then the question would be, is organ donation mutilation? A nebulous subject, as medical ethics tend to be.
    Getting back to the discussion, I think Justin meant civilians that perish in “shellings and air raids”. Is that what happened at the Abu Kabir institute? Was Abu Kabir performing autopsies and extracting organs from Palestinians killed in IDF actions and removed from the battlefield? Everything I’ve read so far contradicts this. It appears that, in the vast majority of cases, Jewish Israelis were overwhelmingly the subject of organ extraction, consistent with the population.
    Why would an autopsy be performed on a cadaver? They’re not common – a lot of people die every day – but they are fairly routine. Obviously the purpose of an autopsy is to determine the precise cause of death, to evaluate the health of the individual at the point of death, and to resolve outstanding medical or legal issues. We are most familiar with autopsies from TV dramas, where they are performed in the course of criminal trials or investigations. However, autopsies need not be associated with a violent act. For example, insurance companies may require that autopsies are performed to determine if the deceased met their end under the conditions of their life insurance policy, or if coverage can be denied. Autopsies have been performed on famous people, to determine the mass of their brain, for example, relative to the population.
    And yes, autopsies would definitely be performed on Palestinians wrongly killed by the IDF – to establish their cause of death beyond doubt – whose families were seeking legal recourse. So, it’s possible that Abu Kabir handled such cases, but it appears there was no “organ profiling”, as it were.
    KFJ, thank you for withholding judgment until you know more. In the context of what is now being reported with more clarity in more media outlets, please consider the title of this post, and the linkage you make between the Swedish story and subsequent outrage by Israeli officials and these recent revelations.

  17. It’s an interesting discussion about presumed consent, etc. But no other country has a situation where legal questions like this bear on non-citizen residents of a militarily occupied territory.
    There have been instances where an Israeli Jew has donated organs to save the life of a Palestinian Arab and the other way around. But this? Taken without even informing the family of the deceased after the fact?
    I think that whole presumed consent theory is a red herring, a way of somehow normalizing what is clearly and obviously an awful crime, unmitigated by a gray area.
    Avigdor, your comments make me think of educated people who once discussed the possibility that maybe Serbia was ‘only trying to protect ethnic Serbs under threat by unruly Kosovars’ or some such line. Why contort oneself so awkwardly to contextualize this particular misbehavior?
    The sense of this whole mess is the obvious one: Israelis, at all levels of the state and society, devalue Palestinians to such an extent that organ stealing without informing the family was seen as a gray area. Stay tuned as we find out if anyone actually gets punished for this.

  18. The sense of this whole mess is the obvious one: Israelis, at all levels of the state and society, devalue Palestinians to such an extent that organ stealing without informing the family was seen as a gray area.
    This is what the JTA article states. ” . . . the weekend, that the institute used corneas from bodies, including Israeli soldiers, Palestinians and foreign workers.”

  19. The JTA article lacks some of the context and information found in this CNN article, which I quoted earlier. I saw just now that I messed the link code up in my earlier post.
    Everyone can make whatever conclusions they wish. I’m simply bringing context that clearly was missing from the discussion. I dug up a couple of articles on Dr. Hiss, the chief pathologist at Abu Kabir. Apparently there was quite a lot of activity against him in the courts around 2005. In fact, these new revelations appear to have been dealt with at that time.
    Infamous Chief Pathologist to Once Again Evade Punishment
    According to the arrangement, the prosecution will request that Prof. Hiss receive only a reprimand for his involvement in the unauthorized removal of parts from 125 bodies. In exchange, Hiss will admit to the acts. The plea bargain is subject to the approval of the court.
    In all of the 125 cases, Dr. Hiss and his subordinates removed organs, bones and tissue without the permission of, and in many cases, against the expressed wishes of the families of the deceased.

    The article, from 2005, goes on with a string of incredible accusations, court testimony and “incidents”… which seem to imply that Dr. Hiss is disturbed in some fashion. Read it. Once again, everyone – Jew, Arab or otherwise, soldier and civilian alike – appears to have been a victim.
    Also, Abu Kabir Forensic Institute is the only facility in Israel or the Territories authorized to conduct autopsies in case of unnatural death. That means it was (and is) the final destination for every single Israeli victim of terrorism, all of whom are autopsied.

  20. It doesn’t matter if the only victims of the organ fiasco were Palestinians or not. What matters is that palestinians, being residents of occupied territories, have no means of addressing their grievances to the government. Therefore, they’re deserving of more protection.

  21. I cannot believe that so many are willing to dismiss such a Mengelian scheme out of hand.
    Israel not only lied about its organ thefts for over a decade, but the Israel’s Chief Pathologist behind the organ thefts was never punished for his cromes and is still employed as Israel’s Chief Pathologist (i.e. Angel of Death) to this day. Now that Israel has been proven to be bald faced liars, how can we believe that they were not purposely shooting Palestinians for their organs, especially given the hundreds of Palestinian children shot in their heads and carted off to Israeli hospitals, and the revelation of the Israeli/NY rabbi trading in human organs for huge profit like a commodity.

  22. I work for an Israeli human rights org, and I read the news every day, and this is the first I’ve heard of it. So no, people aren’t that outraged, people don’t even know–and the people who are outraged are the people who are always outraged. It changes nothing. Unfortunately, devastatingly, like pretty much everything that happens here, it changes nothing.

  23. So I just read the JTA article that mentions the news was on Channel 2–not having a TV, I can see why I missed it. But it also said it ran over the weekend. It’s now Tuesday (which is like Wednesday for us) and nobody has been talking about it. My point stands.

  24. especially given the hundreds of Palestinian children shot in their heads
    Can you provide some context for such a claim?

  25. It doesn’t matter if the only victims of the organ fiasco were Palestinians or not.
    It doesn’t matter if we are discussing organ harvesting in general . . . . but it does matter if we are suggesting that the Israeli government is purposefully targeting Palestinians for organ harvesting.

  26. J1-
    It seems that what disturbs many is simply that the organ harvesting happened, irrelevant of what nationality the individual was. It’s wrong to take organs from dead bodies ESPECIALLY without informing the family of the deceased. THAT’S the issue.

  27. So I just read the JTA article that mentions the news was on Channel 2–not having a TV, I can see why I missed it. But it also said it ran over the weekend. It’s now Tuesday (which is like Wednesday for us) and nobody has been talking about it. My point stands.
    Video: Interview with Israel’s Chief Pathologist on unauthorized organ harvesting (with some context)
    http://coteret.com/2009/12/22/video-interview-with-israels-chief-pathologist-on-unauthorized-organ-harvesting-with-some-context/
    http://www.vimeo.com/8332986

  28. Toda Hague, it would not make any sense to kill random people in order to “harvest” their organs. The donor’s serotype and the recipient’s have to match as closely as possible, else the recipient’s body will do its best to destroy the transplant as “foreign”. Such a match is rare. – Those “kill to harvest” myths are drivel, most likely a spin-off of the “kidnapped to harvest” legend.
    http://www.coe.int/t/dghl/monitoring/trafficking/Docs/News/OrganTrafficking_study.pdf

  29. I was surprised by the JTA posting, which referenced an AP report. But when I searched “Israel body parts” or “Yehuda Hiss” the principal culprit in the AP site, there’s nothing. All the internet postings about this reference articles from years and years ago that were published in Israel…some in Tel Aviv’s local Ha’Ir, one in Yediot, only translated into English after the Swedish accusations. Nothing new to this year or this week. I will go back and see what I can retrieve from my Channel 2 feed archive,but I think it’s hard to imagine this would air on TV and not be picked up by Yediot or Ha’Aretz. I think a very real question is how did this story surface on JTA’s site yesterday at all?

  30. KFJ, I’m surprised you’re so out of touch here. Angry families, and investigative journalists who’ve looked into the matter, have been accusing Hiss of macabre, illegal and predatory activities involving dead bodies for something like two decades. This isn’t remotely new.
    For reasons as yet unknown, Israeli politicians continued to coddle him.
    Further these sorts of shenanigans are rampant throughout pathology institutes and morgues worldwide. The only difference here is that the doctor’s nationality is Israeli. And as Avigdor pointed out these charges (or rather facts) are utterly immaterial to the titillating falsehoods published by the Swedish “journalist”.
    And KFJ, I just had to laugh at this: “My home federation (if I could say such a thing) in Seattle was shot up (1 died, 5 injured) during Operation Cast Lead by a man upset over Israel’s brutality in Gaza.”
    Hmmmmm….. chronology check! The Jewish Federation assault took place in 2006. Cast Lead took place in late Dec. 2008. Pre-traumatic Stress Disorder?
    The guy was a psychotic who kept going off his drugs, and proclaimed himself a “jihadi” in his jailhouse phone calls. His mother knew he was crazy and kept trying to talk him out of his delusions.
    Definitely the kind of guy we should turn to for a balanced and contextual view of Israeli affairs.

  31. Hmmmmm….. chronology check! The Jewish Federation assault took place in 2006. Cast Lead took place in late Dec. 2008. Pre-traumatic Stress Disorder?
    You conveniently fail to mention that while it wasn’t Cast Lead but the Second Lebanon War that he cited as his rationalle.
    Definitely the kind of guy we should turn to for a balanced and contextual view of Israeli affairs.
    Yes, and the Ft. Hood shooter was also a wacko with a track record. You obviously haven’t read the government reports on profiles of terrorists: intelligent, educated, prosperous people with convictions become terrorists more than poor, uneducated brainwashed peons. You make light of people in my home town becoming the victims of anti-Semitism, Eric, and it’s really discomforting. You of all commentors here, whose anti-Semitism hysteria can be clocked with an egg time, suddenly
    Further these sorts of shenanigans are rampant throughout pathology institutes and morgues worldwide. The only difference here is that the doctor’s nationality is Israeli.
    Um, yes, I beleive that is my point. Apparently Eric thinks that (a) such theft from the bodies of Israeli soldiers dead are quite fine and (b) there will be no consequences for this news out there anti-Semitism land.
    I can’t beleive that our roles have reversed, Eric: I’m harping on anti-Semitism/terrorism and you’re arguing for compassion. Talk about a weird week.

  32. For reasons as yet unknown, Israeli politicians continued to coddle him.
    I don’t know anything for a fact, but the reason Hiss received slap after slap on the wrist, instead of being professionally put down long ago – despite his apparent high level of knowledge and scientific ability – is that his testimony or signature, as head of the only forensic institute in Israel qualified to do autopsies, secured dozens, perhaps hundreds of criminal cases in Israel. Undermining his professional standing may have opened the possibility to the release of hundreds of murderers.
    That’s the only reason I can think of why the system treated him with such kid gloves; a situation he seems to have abused. Something like this COULD have happened in the US, and has in some form – once, twice, ten times – but not over the course of years, with numerous faculty members of an institution knowing what was going on. Someone would have eventually called the resident attorney and asked for legal guidance. Israel is a much smaller country, though, with fewer stakeholders. I’m sure some doctors were uncomfortable, but ultimately they relied on Dr. Hiss’s professional credibility that permission was granted by the families.
    From an administrative and institutional cultural standpoint, these issues appear to have been addressed.

  33. I thought I remembered reading that this happened in a medical ethics textbook, but could not find the story to support it. Now I have.
    British harvest dead children’s organs, from 1988 to 1996
    Yes, REALLY. Like I said, this REALLY COULD happen anywhere. Do you remember anyone lambasting the British at the time as a society that should, as a consequence, cease to exist? Did anyone make a note of this incident as endemic of the moral rot of the British people?
    No, of course not. It was a British domestic scandal involving medical ethics, nothing more. It was fixed, laws were passed, physicians bodies around the world took note at conferences, etc. I rarely to never bring up anti-semitism. I wasn’t brought up with the uniquely American victimhood Holocaust industry that many of you were, though most of my family was murdered. In the Soviet Union, everyone lost everything and I never thought we Jews were somehow unique in our loss, great as it was for my family.
    But this… this provides a true litmus test for real anti-Semitism. The best blood libels, the most deadly, are those which start with a speck of truth, stripped of context. If you have connected, in your mind, the Abu Kabir organ harvesting scandal to the nature of the State of Israel as a whole, or to the moral foundations of the “Jewish State”, you’re a real, certified anti-Semite, and should probably work on that.

  34. Dear Kung Fu Jew,
    I understand why you wrote that you’re a little sick in the stomach, but please take a closer look at what really happened:
    Did Israel admit to harvesting organs? Well, not Israel, but a man called Dr. Yehouda Hiss, former head of the Forensic Institute. Not admitted, but recorded surreptitiously when telling what had long ago been confirmed by police. Not harvesting organs,but taking samples for the purpose of medical research and encouraging organ donations, without permission from families (which is very wrong, and that is why he was sanctioned and deposed. And not Palestinians, but anyone whose corpse was sent to the Institute. Incidentally, most of the bodies concerned were those of IDF soldiers, which explains why the IDF had to comment on the story.
    All this was quite clear in the Channel 2 report that caused the recent stir (see the original story here:http://reshet.ynet.co.il/%D7%97%D7%93%D7%A9%D7%95%D7%AA/News/Domestic/Health/Article,33697.aspx ). Wherefore it appears that there’s nothing here to even remotely confirm the allegations printed in the Swedish paper Aftonbladet.
    The story in the JTA, which caused your dismay, does not reflect the original Channel 2 report, and does a poor job in accrediting a distorted version. However, in Britain, the Guardian, which often covers Israeli affairs in an unfair manner, has had the intellectual honesty to set the record straight by apologizing about the misleading headline and correcting it:
    “We should not have put the headline “Israel admits harvesting Palestinian organs” on a story about an admission, by the former head of the Abu Kabir forensic institute near Tel Aviv, that during the 1990s specialists at the institute harvested organs from the bodies of Israeli soldiers, Israeli citizens, Palestinians and foreign workers without getting permission from the families of the deceased (21 December, page 15). That headline did not match the article, which made clear that the organs were not taken only from Palestinians. This was a serious editing error and the headline has been changed online to reflect the text of the story written by the reporter.”
    (see at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2009/dec/22/corrections-clarifications )
    All this will be of no significance to what you call “our haters”. They will seize any opportunity to distort reality and exploit the openness and transparency of Israeli society in order to slander and denigrate it. But at least we have to know the truth and share it, so that it may bring peace with it.
    “Therefore, you shall love truth and peace”. (Zachariah. 8:19).
    יִהְיֶה לְבֵית יְהוּדָה לְשָשׂוֹן וּלְשִמְחָה וּלְמעֲדִים טוֹבִים וְהָאֱמֶת וְהַשָלוֹם אֱהָבוּ

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