[News] Israel’s organ theft scandal exposes a culture of desecration

[Anti-Imperialist News]

 Israel’s organ theft scandal exposes a culture of desecration

Tel Aviv’s pageant of kidney-donor virtue cannot wash away the Palestinian
bodies, forensic warnings, and trafficking scandals that still demand a
reckoning.

Robert Inlakesh <https://thecradle.co/authors/robert-inlakesh>

MAY 13, 2026 -
https://thecradle.co/articles/israels-organ-theft-scandal-exposes-a-culture-of-desecration
Photo Credit: The Cradle

On 25 January, Israeli President Isaac Herzog stood before a crowd
celebrating what Tel Aviv claimed was a world record
<https://www.gov.il/en/pages/president-herzog-attends-celebration-of-world-record-number-of-kidney-donors-25-jan-2026>
in kidney donations. The event, promoted after a lobbying push to Guinness
World Records, was meant to project generosity, discipline, and moral
purpose.

But Guinness listed only the gathering itself
<https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/517553-largest-gathering-of-organ-transplant-donors>
as a record, not the kidney donations that Tel Aviv had turned into a
public relations show.

*The bodies behind the numbers*

In Gaza, where Israel has been returning Palestinian bodies in bags,
sometimes decomposed, mutilated, or showing signs of surgical interference,
the celebration landed differently. For Palestinian health officials, the
question was not how Israel had produced so many donors, but whether all of
those bodies had consented.

Dimming Israel’s “propaganda facade <https://www.alquds.com/en/posts/225893>”
was none other than Dr Munir al-Bursh, director general of the Palestinian
Health Ministry in Gaza. He said Israel’s “record numbers” raised serious
questions about the sources of the kidneys and other organs now being
celebrated. He pointed to the stark contradiction of an occupation state
that has held Palestinian bodies for years in the “cemeteries of numbers”
and refrigerators while presenting itself to the world as a humanitarian
model in organ donation.

Bursh cited documented cases of bodies returned to families missing organs,
especially kidneys, without medical reports, autopsy files, or any legal
path to accountability. He demanded an independent international
investigation into whether Israel’s claimed achievement had been built on
the theft of Palestinian organs.

Just over a week later, Israel returned the scattered remains of some 54
Palestinians
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/8/families-inconsolable-in-gaza-as-israel-returns-more-unidentified-bodies>
to Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. Forensic teams quickly got to work in an
attempt to identify the bodies and give closure to their families, but
noted that many of the corpses had clear signs of torture and the surgical
organ removal.

This was not the first such warning since Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. Ten days
into Israel’s genocide in Gaza, allegations of organ theft
<https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/gaza-authorities-accuse-israel-of-stealing-organs-from-released-palestinian-bodies/3719641>
had already surfaced. By late November 2023, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor
called
<https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/intl-committee-must-investigate-israels-holding-dead-bodies-gaza-enar>
for an investigation into the theft of Palestinian organs, after “medical
professionals found evidence of organ theft, including missing cochleas and
corneas as well as other vital organs like livers, kidneys, and hearts.”

Israel and its defenders moved to blunt the spread of these allegations by
invoking “blood libel
<https://www.adl.org/resources/article/unfounded-claims-organ-harvesting-reignite-embers-decades-old-hospital-scandal>”
and antisemitism. Because the evidence came from Palestinians, calls for
international scrutiny have largely fallen on deaf ears.

*A scandal Israel never buried*

This is precisely what happened in the early 1990s, when Palestinian
medical professionals and the families of the dead had accused Israel of
illicit organ harvesting during the First Intifada. In fact, back in 1992,
then-Israeli health minister Ehud Olmert had even organized a public organ
donation campaign
<https://www.blackagendareport.com/organ-theft-neo-cannibalism-and-israels-trade-palestinian-death>.
As with today, presenting an image of humanitarianism.

In 1999, US anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes began exposing what had
long been ignored. As co-founder of Organs Watch, an organization created
to monitor organ trafficking and its human cost, she later brought the
issue before a US congressional subcommittee in 2001.

The breakthrough came with her published interview with Yehuda Hiss, the
chief pathologist at the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute – the sole Israeli
facility authorized to conduct autopsies in cases of unnatural death.

Hiss admitted
<https://hods.org/pdf/press/Body%20of%20the%20Terrorist,CounterPunch%20.pdf>
that Abu Kabir had harvested organs from Palestinian bodies without consent.

The Israeli state narrative, built through an internal investigation,
claimed that the theft of organs did not specifically target Palestinians,
but that Israeli soldiers were also victims. However, Israel’s Channel 2
ran a documentary on the issue, interviewing pathologists at Abu Kabir, one
of whom explicitly stated that “we never took skin from the bodies of
Israeli soldiers, but from the others.”

Scheper-Hughes stated in 2009 that much of the world’s illicit trafficking
of kidneys can be traced back to the Israelis. “Israel is the top
<https://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/09/01/blackmarket.organs/>,” she
said, claiming that “it has tentacles reaching out worldwide.” She reported
that Israeli citizens, who were often compensated by the Ministry of Health
and in a project backed by the Defense Ministry, were responsible for mass
transplant tourism.

Israelis preyed on vulnerable populations from Brazil to the Philippines. A
BBC report <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/events/newsnight/1437345.stm> from
2001 even described a situation where “hundreds of Israelis have created a
production line that starts in the villages of Moldova, where men today are
walking around with one kidney.”

In what was a controversial article for its time, the Swedish
Newspaper *Aftonbladet
*published claims in 2009 that Palestinians had been targeted and killed
for their organs
<https://www.aftonbladet.se/kultur/a/Rx1n5A/our-sons-are-plundered-of-their-organs>
by the Israeli military.

Although Israel and its supporters like to write off this entire scandal by
claiming it was an isolated series of cases, Hiss and his fellow
pathologists at Abu Kabir, who publicly admitted to organ theft, were not
even penalized for their behavior. Hiss was not sentenced to a lengthy
prison term; in fact, he was allowed to continue working at Abu Kabir.

In other words, there was never any accountability, simply an internal
Israeli investigation, followed by pledges from the Israeli military and
government that they no longer harvest the organs of Palestinians.

*The numbers behind Tel Aviv’s record *

The Israeli organization at the center of the current world-record claim is
Matnat Chaim, founded in February 2009, shortly after Tel Aviv passed
legislation banning organ trafficking. Jerusalem, where the organization is
based, has therefore become the leading city
<https://kilya.org.il/he/224-תרומות-כליה-בשנת-2024/:~:text=בשנת%202024%20תרמו%20224%20איש,בתרומ%D7>
in Israel for altruistic kidney donations. Tel Aviv claims Matnat Chaim
surpassed 2,000 transplants, earning the record celebrated in January.

The available data raises obvious questions.

Between 2009 and 2021, Matnat Chaim said it performed 1,000 transplants
<https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-kidney-donation-organization-marks-record-breaking-1000-transplants/>.
In 2022, according to the non-profit’s own figures, it facilitated 202
transplants, down from 215 the previous year. That means the publicly
available total before the November 2023 allegations stood at 1,277
<https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1600613524002764#bib32>.
To reach 2,000, the organization would have had to add 723 transplants in
just over three years.

According to Israel’s National Transplant Center, the total number of live
donor transplants for 2023, 2024, and 2025
<https://www.gov.il/en/pages/living-donor-organ-transplant> totaled 923. In
2022, the last year for which publicly available data on Matnat Chaim’s
specific contributions are available, the organization accounted for 63
percent of live transplants. If that rate held, its share over those three
years would be around 581 transplants, short of the 2,000 mark.

This does not, by itself, incriminate Matnat Chaim. But it does explain why
Bursh questioned the claim at face value, especially in the shadow of
Israel’s long record of organ theft and the testimony emerging from Gaza’s
hospitals.

Another interesting fact, which supports skepticism surrounding the
extremely high numbers boasted by Israel, is that only 14
<https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7199310/#:~:text=In%20a%20recent%20survey%20administered,organ%20donor%20card%20%5B6%5D.>*
percent* of its population has signed the Adi (Ehud) Ben Dror donor card.
This makes Israel amongst the lowest
<https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1410828/> of any developed
nation. In most western countries, the average is 30 percent of the
population that signs on to donate their organs.

Organ donations have long been a contentious issue amongst Israelis. For
example, the Chief Rabbi of British-occupied Palestine in 1931 had declared
<https://thebaffler.com/latest/im-not-done-with-you-turfah> that the idea
that the practice desecrates the dead is “unique to Jews … gentiles [had]
no reason to be particularly careful about avoiding [it] if there is a
natural purpose for doing so, such as medical reasons.”

In 1996, influential Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh of the Chabad Lubavitch sect
asserted
<https://mondoweiss.net/2025/02/a-brief-history-of-israels-theft-and-trafficking-of-palestinian-organs/>
that if a Jewish person needs a liver, “can you take the liver of an
innocent non-Jew passing by to save him? The Torah would probably permit
that. Jewish life has infinite value. There is something infinitely more
holy and unique about Jewish life than non-Jewish life.”

The current public position of Israel’s top religious authorities is that
organ donation is permissible for Jews, but that consensus is relatively
recent. Only over the past decade has there been a marked rise in Jewish
donors. For many observant Jews, the issue remains contested.

That social context, combined with Israel’s relatively small population,
makes it all the more suspicious as to why the Israel National Skin Bank
(INSB), for example, has been reported
<https://researchcentre.trtworld.com/publications/podcast/israels-skin-bank-paradox-and-organ-harvesting-allegations/>
as one of the largest, if not the largest, on earth. The INSB operates
jointly under both the Israeli Ministry of Health and the military.

*Desecration as policy*

Israel has long treated Palestinian bodies as instruments of control. In
2017, Tel Aviv admitted losing track of the bodies
<https://www.solidarity-ps.org/en/Stealing_Martyrs_Organs> of Palestinian
political prisoners who died in detention. The explanation pointed to the
Israeli practice of burying Palestinians in anonymous graves in what is
known as the “cemetery of numbers
<https://www.leftvoice.org/cemetery-of-numbers-israels-practice-of-withholding-the-bodies-of-deceased-palestinians/>,”
a cruel method designed to deny families the location of their loved ones.
Palestinians have also voiced fears that some of the missing bodies were
robbed of their organs.

Beyond Palestine, Israelis have been repeatedly linked to organ trafficking
cases around the world.

The only person ever convicted in the US of organ trafficking was an
Israeli named Levy Izhak Rosenbaum. US District Judge Anne Thompson in New
Jersey described him as a black-market “profiteer” who was “trading in
human misery
<https://web.archive.org/web/20170204060831/https:/www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-12-24/organ-broker-skirts-expulsion-after-victimless-claim>.”
He served only two and a half years in prison and avoided deportation.

In 2010, five Israeli citizens, including a retired army general, were
charged with running an organ trafficking ring. Their abusive scheme was
described as a “form of modern slavery
<https://archive.ph/BVfs1#selection-1543.99-1543.124>,” exploiting
vulnerable people in developing countries for their organs. The case
exposed an uncomfortable contradiction for the Israeli judicial system:
conduct it was now prosecuting had, only two years earlier, been
effectively tolerated by state structures.

In 2015, Turkish authorities arrested
<https://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsAFCON2025/2025/172641.aspx> a suspected
Israeli organ trafficker, investigating a ring that was responsible for
targeting Syrian refugees. As recently as 2024, four Israeli nationals
<https://www.turkishminute.com/2024/05/06/israeli-national-among-9-arrested-turkey-over-illegal-organ-trade/>
were arrested by the Turkish police in a crackdown on a separate ring that
also preyed on Syrian refugees and other disadvantaged populations in
Turkiye.

In 2018, the police in Cyprus arrested Israeli citizen Moshe Harel, accusing
<https://www.dw.com/en/israeli-mastermind-behind-organ-trafficking-ring-is-arrested-in-cyprus/a-42051747>
him of operating a global organ trafficking ring, in a scandal that dates
back to 2008, when a Turkish man collapsed in a Pristina airport, visibly
in pain after having his kidney removed. Harel had previously been arrested
by Israeli authorities in 2012, but was released.

The aforementioned cases are now treated as illegal by the Israeli
government. But there was a time when Israelis traveling abroad for organs
were not only tolerated but effectively encouraged. That history helps
explain why Israeli citizens keep appearing in organ trafficking scandals
across continents. The Israeli Health Ministry itself helped foster a
culture in which the bodies of the poor, the displaced, and the occupied
could be turned into medical inventory.

*Why no investigation?*

Despite this documented history, western institutions continue to enable
the Israeli military. In October last year, the University of Southern
California (USC) was exposed for selling 32 human cadavers
<https://ca.cair.com/press-release/cair-la-condemns-uscs-disturbing-sale-of-human-cadavers-for-israeli-military-training-calls-for-transparency-and-accountability/>
to the US military, which were used for surgical training by the Israeli
military. The Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR) condemned the
revelation as “disturbing.” The bodies of deceased Americans had been sold
into a chain that served an army carrying out genocide in Gaza.

A month later, new allegations would then emerge from medical professionals
in the Gaza Strip of organ theft. This came amidst the release of a batch
of bodies to the Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis, where a doctor remarked
<https://www.thecanary.co/global/world-analysis/2025/11/06/gaza-organ-theft-even-in-death-palestinians-are-not-free-from-occupation/>
that “The bodies arrived stuffed with cotton, with gaps suggesting organs
were removed. What we saw is indescribable.”

With a wealth of evidence and accusations indicating that Israel has been
implicated in the systematic harvesting of organs during its genocide, it
begs the question as to why no independent international investigation has
yet been opened.

As in the early 1990s, Palestinian evidence is again being buried beneath
western political protection, fear of Israel lobby retaliation, and the
standing presumption that Israeli institutions can investigate themselves.
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