Sometimes wild-sounding stories do turn out to be true.
It seems there is now a videotape admission from a supervisor in one Israeli hospital that organs were being harvested from dead Palestinians without permission from the family or anyone else.
The 57-minute video was filmed by Yehuda Hiss, the director and chief pathologist at the Abu Kabir Institute of Forensic Medicine, and explains how he authorized organ theft, gave instructions to doctors to do so and said he would sometimes snatch the organs himself.
….Israeli law prohibits taking organs from corpses without obtaining permission from the family of the deceased, which Hiss said he specifically instructed doctors not to do.
“We did it for the sake of research and medical progress,” said Hiss, who admitted to having removed organs from 125 bodies without permission or authorization.
News of organ thefts led to the suspension of Hiss as director of the institute in 2005 but Israel’s top attorney decided not to press charges and Hiss ended up just being reprimanded and going back to his position at the institute.
The Israeli Ministry of Health responded to the tape by saying that everything was done in accordance with the law while hospitals that were named argued that the topic is old news and there is no point bringing it up again now.
Ho-hum. Old news…nothing to see here, just move along…

johnpi 1:22 pm on December 20, 2009 Permalink |
Phillip Weiss reminds that when this story came out earlier this year, Israeli lobbyists dismissed it as an “anti-Semitic canard.”
midwinterspring 2:07 pm on December 20, 2009 Permalink |
I have to admit guilt here. I’m fairly passionate in my opposition to the Israeli state, but I found myself chastising people for spreading rumors and making the Palestinian movement look bad when I heard these stories.
pi.info 2:10 pm on December 20, 2009 Permalink |
Yeah. That’s why this is the first post about it. It sounded so outlandish I didn’t want to spread around a falsehood. It’s a good thing they’ve got ’smoking gun’ evidence for this now…