ilad Atzmon — The IDF: Israel’s Organ Grinder

By Gilad Atzmon • Aug 19th, 2009 at 13:39 • Category: Analysis,
Counter-terrorism, No thanks!, Gilad Atzmon, Gilad’s Choice, Israel,
Newswire, Our Authors, Palestine, Zionism
UPDATE! ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF SWEDISH ARTICLE
In the photo, The IDF’s Chief Rabbi, OC Chaplaincy Brig. Gen. Avichai
Ronzki and OC Medical Corps Brig. Gen. Nachman Ash both signed up for
an organ donation card during a ceremony in the Kirya Military
Headquarters in Tel Aviv. One wonders if they are aware that, if the
claims are true, their very own IDF has at least on several occasions
been involved in obtaining younger organs from Palestinians they have
killed, returned to their families after five days and had buried in a
regime of a night-time blackout under Israeli-enforced Palestinian
curfew.

There is an old Jewish joke that tells the story of a dying Jewish
merchant who calls his son to his sickbed just before he perishes. He
tells him, “Listen to me Moisha’le, life is not just about money… you
can also do gold and diamonds.”

Monitoring Israeli and Jewish news reveals a devastating fact, it is
not ‘just’ about money. It may also be about human organs. A few weeks
ago we learned about a ring of American Rabbis who had been arrested
in New Jersey upon suspicion of human organs trafficking (amongst many
other crimes). Rabbi Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, we read, enticed
“vulnerable people to give up a kidney for $10,000 which he would turn
around and sell for $160,000.” Not too bad, I thought to myself then.
We are living in hard times, financial melt down, credit crunch, Wall
Street is licking its wounds, the car industry is evaporating.
Seemingly, kidney trafficking is still booming.

In fact, the ring of the Rabbi in New Jersey didn’t take me by
complete surprise. For years we have been hearing about Palestinians
claiming that Israel is “deep into organ trafficking.” We also learned
that the family of Alastair Sinclair, a Scottish tourist who hanged
himself in an Israeli jail, “was forced to bring suit for his return
with missing body parts.”

In 2002 the Tehran Times reported: “The Zionist state has tacitly
admitted that doctors at the Israeli forensic institute at Abu Kabir
had extracted the vital organs of three Palestinian teenage children
killed by the Israeli Army nearly ten days ago. Zionist Minister of
Health Nessim Dahhan said in response to a question by Arab member of
the Zionist Parliament ‘Knesset’, Ahmed Teibi, on Tuesday that he
couldn’t deny that organs of Palestinian youths and children killed by
the Israeli forces were taken out for transplants or scientific
research.”

But now the news about Israeli trafficking of human organ is spreading
to Western mainstream media. Ynet, the biggest Israeli online
newspaper, reported today that “Leading Swedish daily Aftonbladet
claimed in one of its articles that IDF soldiers killed Palestinians
in order to trade in their organs.”

A few weeks ago we had a debate here on PTT whether Zionism is a
colonial apparatus or not. One of the Materialist arguments against
the perception of Zionism as a colonial practice was that Palestine
has never been too attractive economically; it lacks oil, gold or
minerals. However, this may change now. People who specialise in organ
theft may find Palestine to be heaven on earth. In the light of the
latest vastly spreading accusations, the Jewish national project maybe
is colonial after all.

Though the Israeli government denies the accusation, and I myself far
from being qualified to know what the truth of the matter is, one
cannot deny that we are facing here a shift of consciousness within
the Western discourse. At the end of the day, after watching the
Israeli army dumping great quantities of white phosphorous on a
civilian population in broad daylight, after seeing Israelis gathering
gleefully en masse on the hills around Gaza just to watch their
military spreading death and physical suffering in a genocidal manner,
after reading that 94% of the Israelis supported the IDF military
campaign against the elderly, women and children, most of whom were
refugees with nowhere to escape and seek further refuge, organ theft
seems to be a ‘light crime’.

Whether or not the Swedish paper’s accusations are genuine is yet to
be revealed. However, one fact has already been established: after so
many years of Western inclination to dance to the relentless crying
violin of the Jewish melancholic victim serenade, the Western media is
now changing its appetite, it is willing to confront Jewish
institutional crime.

Rather than talking about the rise of anti-Semitism, we better discuss
the growth of Jewish institutional crime.

“Our sons plundered for their organs”

You could call me a “matchmaker,” said Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, from
Brooklyn, USA, in a secret recording with an FBI-agent whom he
believed to be a client. Ten days later, at the end of July this year,
Rosenbaum was arrested and a vast, Sopranos-like, imbroglio of
money-laundering and illegal organ-trade was revealed. Rosenbaum’s
matchmaking had nothing to do with romance. It was all about buying
and selling kidneys from Israel on the black market. Rosenbaum says
that he buys the kidneys for 10,000 dollars, from poor people. He then
proceeds to sell the organs to desperate patients in the States for
160,000 dollars. The accusations have shaken the American
transplantation business. If they are true it means that organ
trafficking is documented for the first time in the US, experts tell
the New Jersey Real-Time News.

On the question of how many organs he has sold Rosenbaum replies:
“Quite a lot. And I have never failed,” he boasts. The business has
been running for quite some time. Francis Delmonici, professor of
transplant surgery at Harvard and member of the National Kidney
Foundation’s Board of Directors, tells the same newspaper that
organ-trafficking, similar to the one reported from Israel, is carried
out in other places of the world as well. 5–6,000 operations a year,
about ten per cent of the wworld’s kidney transplants are carried out
illegally, according to Delmonici.

Countries suspected of these activities are Pakistan, the Philippines
and China, where the organs are allegedly taken from executed
prisoners. But Palestinians also harbor strong suspicions against
Israel for seizing young men and having them serve as the country’s
organ reserve — a very seriouus accusation, with enough question marks
to motivate the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to start an
investigation about possible war crimes.

Israel has repeatedly been under fire for its unethical ways of
dealing with organs and transplants. France was among the countries
that ceased organ collaboration with Israel in the nineties. Jerusalem
Post wrote that “the rest of the European countries are expected to
follow France’s example shortly.”

Half of the kidneys transplanted to Israelis since the beginning of
the 2000s have been bought illegally from Turkey, Eastern Europe or
Latin America. Israeli health authorities have full knowledge of this
business but do nothing to stop it. At a conference in 2003 it was
shown that Israel is the only western country with a medical
profession that doesn’t condemn the illegal organ trade. The country
takes no legal measures against doctors participating in the illegal
business — on the contrary, chief medical officers of Israel’s big
hospitals are involved in most of the illegal transplants, according
to Dagens Nyheter (December 5, 2003).

In the summer of 1992, Ehud Olmert, then minister of health, tried to
address the issue of organ shortage by launching a big campaign aimed
at having the Israeli public register for postmortal organ donation.
Half a million pamphlets were spread in local newspapers. Ehud Olmert
himself was the first person to sign up. A couple of weeks later the
Jerusalem Post reported that the campaign was a success. No fewer than
35,000 people had signed up. Prior to the campaign it would have been
500 in a normal month. In the same article, however, Judy Siegel, the
reporter, wrote that the gap between supply and demand was still
large. 500 people were in line for a kidney transplant, but only 124
transplants could be performed. Of 45 people in need of a new liver,
only three could be operated on in Israel.

While the campaign was running, young Palestinian men started to
disappear from villages in the West Bank and Gaza. After five days
Israeli soldiers would bring them back dead, with their bodies ripped
open.

Talk of the bodies terrified the population of the occupied
territories. There were rumors of a dramatic increase of young men
disappearing, with ensuing nightly funerals of autopsied bodies.

I was in the area at the time, working on a book. On several occasions
I was approached by UN staff concerned about the developments. The
persons contacting me said that organ theft definitely occurred but
that they were prevented from doing anything about it. On an
assignment from a broadcasting network I then travelled around
interviewing a great number of Palestininan families in the West Bank
and Gaza — meeting parents who told of how their sons had been
deprived of organs before being killed. One example that I encountered
on this eerie trip was the young stone-thrower Bilal Achmed Ghanan.

It was close to midnight when the motor roar from an Israeli military
column sounded from the outskirts of Imatin, a small village in the
northern parts of the West Bank. The two thousand inhabitants were
awake. They were still, waiting, like silent shadows in the dark, some
lying upon roofs, others hiding behind curtains, walls, or trees that
provided protection during the curfew but still offered a full view
toward what would become the grave for the first martyr of the
village. The military had interrupted the electricity and the area was
now a closed-off military zone — not even a cat could move outdoors
without risking its life. The overpowering silence of the dark night
was only interrupted by quiet sobbing. I don’t remember if our
shivering was due to the cold or to the tension. Five days earlier, on
May 13, 1992, an Israeli special force had used the village’s
carpentry workshop for an ambush. The person they were assigned to put
out of action was Bilal Achmed Ghanan, one of the stone-throwing
Palestinian youngsters who made life difficult for the Israeli
soldiers.

As one of the leading stone-throwers Bilal Ghanan had been wanted by
the military for a couple of years. Together with other stone-throwing
boys he hid in the Nablus mountains, with no roof over his head.
Getting caught meant torture and death for these boys — they had to
stay in the mountains at all costs.

On May 13 Bilal made an exception, when for some reason, he walked
unprotected by the carpentry workshop. Not even Talal, his older
brother, knows why he took this risk. Maybe the boys were out of food
and needed to restock.

Everything went according to plan for the Israeli special force. The
soldiers stubbed their cigarettes, put away their cans of Coca-Cola,
and calmly aimed through the broken window. When Bilal was close
enough they needed only to pull the triggers. The first shot hit him
in the chest. According to villagers who witnessed the incident he was
subsequently shot with one bullet in each leg. Two soldiers then ran
down from the carpentry workshop and shot Bilal once in the stomach.
Finally, they grabbed him by his feet and dragged him up the twenty
stone steps of the workshop stair. Villagers say that people from both
the UN and the Red Crescent were close by, heard the discharge and
came to look for wounded people in need of care. Some arguing took
place as to who should take care of the victim. Discussions ended with
Israeli soldiers loading the badly wounded Bilal in a jeep and driving
him to the outskirts of the village, where a military helicopter
waited. The boy was flown to a destination unknown to his family. Five
days later he came back, dead and wrapped in green hospital fabric.

A villager recognized Captain Yahya, the leader of the military column
who had transported Bilal from the postmortem center Abu Kabir,
outside of Tel Aviv, to the place for his final rest. “Captain Yahya
is the worst of them all,” the villager whispered in my ear. After
Yahya had unloaded the body and changed the green fabric for a light
cotton one, some male relatives of the victim were chosen by the
soldiers to do the job of digging and mixing cement.

Together with the sharp noises from the shovels we could hear laughter
from the soldiers who, as they waited to go home, exchanged some
jokes. As Bilal was put in the grave his chest was uncovered. Suddenly
it became clear to the few people present just what kind of abuse the
boy had been exposed to. Bilal was not by far the first young
Palestinian to be buried with a slit from his abdomen up to his chin.

The families in the West Bank and in Gaza felt that they knew exactly
what had happened: “Our sons are used as involuntary organ donors,”
relatives of Khaled from Nablus told me, as did the mother of Raed
from Jenin and the uncles of Machmod and Nafes from Gaza, who had all
disappeared for a number of days only to return at night, dead and
autopsied.

- Why are they keeping the bodies for up to five days before they
let us bury them? What happened to the bodies during that time? Why
are they performing autopsy, against our will, when the cause of death
is obvious? Why are the bodies returned at night? Why is it done with
a military escort? Why is the area closed off during the funeral? Why
is the electricity interrupted? Nafe’s uncle was upset and he had a
lot of questions.

The relatives of the dead Palestinians no longer harbored any doubts
as to the reasons for the killings, but the spokesperson for the
Israeli army claimed that the allegations of organ theft were lies.
All the Palestinian victims go through autopsy on a routine basis, he
said. Bilal Achmed Ghanem was one of 133 Palestinians killed in
various ways that year. According to the Palestinian statistics the
causes of death were: shot in the street, explosion, tear gas,
deliberately run over, hanged in prison, shot in school, killed at
home et cetera. The 133 people killed were between four months to 88
years old. Only half of them, 69 victims, went through postmortem
examination. The routine autopsy of killed Palestinians — of which
the army spokesperson was talking — has no bearing on the reality in
the occupied territories. The questions remain.

We know that Israel has a great need for organs, that there is a vast
and illegal trade of organs which has been running for many years now,
that the authorities are aware of it and that doctors in managing
positions at the big hospitals participate, as well as civil servants
at various levels. We also know that young Palestinian men
disappeared, that they were brought back after five days, at night,
under tremendous secrecy, stitched back together after having been cut
from abdomen to chin.

It’s time to bring clarity to this macabre business, to shed light on
what is going on and what has taken place in the territories occupied
by Israel since the Intifada began.

Donald Boström

Israel is the real danger in this world. It doing every crime against Palestine with the support of US.
Why we are so quiet about this nation? For Israel, we the US is becomg the enemy of the wrold and our kids are dying in the ME, not the Israeli soldier.

ilad Atzmon — The IDF: Israel’s Organ Grinder

By Gilad Atzmon • Aug 19th, 2009 at 13:39 • Category: Analysis,
Counter-terrorism, No thanks!, Gilad Atzmon, Gilad’s Choice, Israel,
Newswire, Our Authors, Palestine, Zionism
UPDATE! ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF SWEDISH ARTICLE
In the photo, The IDF’s Chief Rabbi, OC Chaplaincy Brig. Gen. Avichai
Ronzki and OC Medical Corps Brig. Gen. Nachman Ash both signed up for
an organ donation card during a ceremony in the Kirya Military
Headquarters in Tel Aviv. One wonders if they are aware that, if the
claims are true, their very own IDF has at least on several occasions
been involved in obtaining younger organs from Palestinians they have
killed, returned to their families after five days and had buried in a
regime of a night-time blackout under Israeli-enforced Palestinian
curfew.

There is an old Jewish joke that tells the story of a dying Jewish
merchant who calls his son to his sickbed just before he perishes. He
tells him, “Listen to me Moisha’le, life is not just about money… you
can also do gold and diamonds.”

Monitoring Israeli and Jewish news reveals a devastating fact, it is
not ‘just’ about money. It may also be about human organs. A few weeks
ago we learned about a ring of American Rabbis who had been arrested
in New Jersey upon suspicion of human organs trafficking (amongst many
other crimes). Rabbi Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, we read, enticed
“vulnerable people to give up a kidney for $10,000 which he would turn
around and sell for $160,000.” Not too bad, I thought to myself then.
We are living in hard times, financial melt down, credit crunch, Wall
Street is licking its wounds, the car industry is evaporating.
Seemingly, kidney trafficking is still booming.

In fact, the ring of the Rabbi in New Jersey didn’t take me by
complete surprise. For years we have been hearing about Palestinians
claiming that Israel is “deep into organ trafficking.” We also learned
that the family of Alastair Sinclair, a Scottish tourist who hanged
himself in an Israeli jail, “was forced to bring suit for his return
with missing body parts.”

In 2002 the Tehran Times reported: “The Zionist state has tacitly
admitted that doctors at the Israeli forensic institute at Abu Kabir
had extracted the vital organs of three Palestinian teenage children
killed by the Israeli Army nearly ten days ago. Zionist Minister of
Health Nessim Dahhan said in response to a question by Arab member of
the Zionist Parliament ‘Knesset’, Ahmed Teibi, on Tuesday that he
couldn’t deny that organs of Palestinian youths and children killed by
the Israeli forces were taken out for transplants or scientific
research.”

But now the news about Israeli trafficking of human organ is spreading
to Western mainstream media. Ynet, the biggest Israeli online
newspaper, reported today that “Leading Swedish daily Aftonbladet
claimed in one of its articles that IDF soldiers killed Palestinians
in order to trade in their organs.”

A few weeks ago we had a debate here on PTT whether Zionism is a
colonial apparatus or not. One of the Materialist arguments against
the perception of Zionism as a colonial practice was that Palestine
has never been too attractive economically; it lacks oil, gold or
minerals. However, this may change now. People who specialise in organ
theft may find Palestine to be heaven on earth. In the light of the
latest vastly spreading accusations, the Jewish national project maybe
is colonial after all.

Though the Israeli government denies the accusation, and I myself far
from being qualified to know what the truth of the matter is, one
cannot deny that we are facing here a shift of consciousness within
the Western discourse. At the end of the day, after watching the
Israeli army dumping great quantities of white phosphorous on a
civilian population in broad daylight, after seeing Israelis gathering
gleefully en masse on the hills around Gaza just to watch their
military spreading death and physical suffering in a genocidal manner,
after reading that 94% of the Israelis supported the IDF military
campaign against the elderly, women and children, most of whom were
refugees with nowhere to escape and seek further refuge, organ theft
seems to be a ‘light crime’.

Whether or not the Swedish paper’s accusations are genuine is yet to
be revealed. However, one fact has already been established: after so
many years of Western inclination to dance to the relentless crying
violin of the Jewish melancholic victim serenade, the Western media is
now changing its appetite, it is willing to confront Jewish
institutional crime.

Rather than talking about the rise of anti-Semitism, we better discuss
the growth of Jewish institutional crime.

“Our sons plundered for their organs”

You could call me a “matchmaker,” said Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, from
Brooklyn, USA, in a secret recording with an FBI-agent whom he
believed to be a client. Ten days later, at the end of July this year,
Rosenbaum was arrested and a vast, Sopranos-like, imbroglio of
money-laundering and illegal organ-trade was revealed. Rosenbaum’s
matchmaking had nothing to do with romance. It was all about buying
and selling kidneys from Israel on the black market. Rosenbaum says
that he buys the kidneys for 10,000 dollars, from poor people. He then
proceeds to sell the organs to desperate patients in the States for
160,000 dollars. The accusations have shaken the American
transplantation business. If they are true it means that organ
trafficking is documented for the first time in the US, experts tell
the New Jersey Real-Time News.

On the question of how many organs he has sold Rosenbaum replies:
“Quite a lot. And I have never failed,” he boasts. The business has
been running for quite some time. Francis Delmonici, professor of
transplant surgery at Harvard and member of the National Kidney
Foundation’s Board of Directors, tells the same newspaper that
organ-trafficking, similar to the one reported from Israel, is carried
out in other places of the world as well. 5–6,000 operations a year,
about ten per cent of the wworld’s kidney transplants are carried out
illegally, according to Delmonici.

Countries suspected of these activities are Pakistan, the Philippines
and China, where the organs are allegedly taken from executed
prisoners. But Palestinians also harbor strong suspicions against
Israel for seizing young men and having them serve as the country’s
organ reserve — a very seriouus accusation, with enough question marks
to motivate the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to start an
investigation about possible war crimes.

Israel has repeatedly been under fire for its unethical ways of
dealing with organs and transplants. France was among the countries
that ceased organ collaboration with Israel in the nineties. Jerusalem
Post wrote that “the rest of the European countries are expected to
follow France’s example shortly.”

Half of the kidneys transplanted to Israelis since the beginning of
the 2000s have been bought illegally from Turkey, Eastern Europe or
Latin America. Israeli health authorities have full knowledge of this
business but do nothing to stop it. At a conference in 2003 it was
shown that Israel is the only western country with a medical
profession that doesn’t condemn the illegal organ trade. The country
takes no legal measures against doctors participating in the illegal
business — on the contrary, chief medical officers of Israel’s big
hospitals are involved in most of the illegal transplants, according
to Dagens Nyheter (December 5, 2003).

In the summer of 1992, Ehud Olmert, then minister of health, tried to
address the issue of organ shortage by launching a big campaign aimed
at having the Israeli public register for postmortal organ donation.
Half a million pamphlets were spread in local newspapers. Ehud Olmert
himself was the first person to sign up. A couple of weeks later the
Jerusalem Post reported that the campaign was a success. No fewer than
35,000 people had signed up. Prior to the campaign it would have been
500 in a normal month. In the same article, however, Judy Siegel, the
reporter, wrote that the gap between supply and demand was still
large. 500 people were in line for a kidney transplant, but only 124
transplants could be performed. Of 45 people in need of a new liver,
only three could be operated on in Israel.

While the campaign was running, young Palestinian men started to
disappear from villages in the West Bank and Gaza. After five days
Israeli soldiers would bring them back dead, with their bodies ripped
open.

Talk of the bodies terrified the population of the occupied
territories. There were rumors of a dramatic increase of young men
disappearing, with ensuing nightly funerals of autopsied bodies.

I was in the area at the time, working on a book. On several occasions
I was approached by UN staff concerned about the developments. The
persons contacting me said that organ theft definitely occurred but
that they were prevented from doing anything about it. On an
assignment from a broadcasting network I then travelled around
interviewing a great number of Palestininan families in the West Bank
and Gaza — meeting parents who told of how their sons had been
deprived of organs before being killed. One example that I encountered
on this eerie trip was the young stone-thrower Bilal Achmed Ghanan.

It was close to midnight when the motor roar from an Israeli military
column sounded from the outskirts of Imatin, a small village in the
northern parts of the West Bank. The two thousand inhabitants were
awake. They were still, waiting, like silent shadows in the dark, some
lying upon roofs, others hiding behind curtains, walls, or trees that
provided protection during the curfew but still offered a full view
toward what would become the grave for the first martyr of the
village. The military had interrupted the electricity and the area was
now a closed-off military zone — not even a cat could move outdoors
without risking its life. The overpowering silence of the dark night
was only interrupted by quiet sobbing. I don’t remember if our
shivering was due to the cold or to the tension. Five days earlier, on
May 13, 1992, an Israeli special force had used the village’s
carpentry workshop for an ambush. The person they were assigned to put
out of action was Bilal Achmed Ghanan, one of the stone-throwing
Palestinian youngsters who made life difficult for the Israeli
soldiers.

As one of the leading stone-throwers Bilal Ghanan had been wanted by
the military for a couple of years. Together with other stone-throwing
boys he hid in the Nablus mountains, with no roof over his head.
Getting caught meant torture and death for these boys — they had to
stay in the mountains at all costs.

On May 13 Bilal made an exception, when for some reason, he walked
unprotected by the carpentry workshop. Not even Talal, his older
brother, knows why he took this risk. Maybe the boys were out of food
and needed to restock.

Everything went according to plan for the Israeli special force. The
soldiers stubbed their cigarettes, put away their cans of Coca-Cola,
and calmly aimed through the broken window. When Bilal was close
enough they needed only to pull the triggers. The first shot hit him
in the chest. According to villagers who witnessed the incident he was
subsequently shot with one bullet in each leg. Two soldiers then ran
down from the carpentry workshop and shot Bilal once in the stomach.
Finally, they grabbed him by his feet and dragged him up the twenty
stone steps of the workshop stair. Villagers say that people from both
the UN and the Red Crescent were close by, heard the discharge and
came to look for wounded people in need of care. Some arguing took
place as to who should take care of the victim. Discussions ended with
Israeli soldiers loading the badly wounded Bilal in a jeep and driving
him to the outskirts of the village, where a military helicopter
waited. The boy was flown to a destination unknown to his family. Five
days later he came back, dead and wrapped in green hospital fabric.

A villager recognized Captain Yahya, the leader of the military column
who had transported Bilal from the postmortem center Abu Kabir,
outside of Tel Aviv, to the place for his final rest. “Captain Yahya
is the worst of them all,” the villager whispered in my ear. After
Yahya had unloaded the body and changed the green fabric for a light
cotton one, some male relatives of the victim were chosen by the
soldiers to do the job of digging and mixing cement.

Together with the sharp noises from the shovels we could hear laughter
from the soldiers who, as they waited to go home, exchanged some
jokes. As Bilal was put in the grave his chest was uncovered. Suddenly
it became clear to the few people present just what kind of abuse the
boy had been exposed to. Bilal was not by far the first young
Palestinian to be buried with a slit from his abdomen up to his chin.

The families in the West Bank and in Gaza felt that they knew exactly
what had happened: “Our sons are used as involuntary organ donors,”
relatives of Khaled from Nablus told me, as did the mother of Raed
from Jenin and the uncles of Machmod and Nafes from Gaza, who had all
disappeared for a number of days only to return at night, dead and
autopsied.

- Why are they keeping the bodies for up to five days before they
let us bury them? What happened to the bodies during that time? Why
are they performing autopsy, against our will, when the cause of death
is obvious? Why are the bodies returned at night? Why is it done with
a military escort? Why is the area closed off during the funeral? Why
is the electricity interrupted? Nafe’s uncle was upset and he had a
lot of questions.

The relatives of the dead Palestinians no longer harbored any doubts
as to the reasons for the killings, but the spokesperson for the
Israeli army claimed that the allegations of organ theft were lies.
All the Palestinian victims go through autopsy on a routine basis, he
said. Bilal Achmed Ghanem was one of 133 Palestinians killed in
various ways that year. According to the Palestinian statistics the
causes of death were: shot in the street, explosion, tear gas,
deliberately run over, hanged in prison, shot in school, killed at
home et cetera. The 133 people killed were between four months to 88
years old. Only half of them, 69 victims, went through postmortem
examination. The routine autopsy of killed Palestinians — of which
the army spokesperson was talking — has no bearing on the reality in
the occupied territories. The questions remain.

We know that Israel has a great need for organs, that there is a vast
and illegal trade of organs which has been running for many years now,
that the authorities are aware of it and that doctors in managing
positions at the big hospitals participate, as well as civil servants
at various levels. We also know that young Palestinian men
disappeared, that they were brought back after five days, at night,
under tremendous secrecy, stitched back together after having been cut
from abdomen to chin.

It’s time to bring clarity to this macabre business, to shed light on
what is going on and what has taken place in the territories occupied
by Israel since the Intifada began.

Donald Boström