Robert Inlakesh
Tel Aviv’s pageant of kidney-donor virtue cannot wash away the Palestinian bodies, forensic warnings, and trafficking scandals that still demand a reckoning.
On 25 January, Israeli President Isaac Herzog stood before a crowd celebrating what Tel Aviv claimed was a world record 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 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” 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 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 had already surfaced. By late November 2023, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor called 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” 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. 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 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,” 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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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 percent of its population has signed the Adi (Ehud) Ben Dror donor card. This makes Israel amongst the lowest 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 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 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 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 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,” 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.” 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,” 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 a suspected Israeli organ trafficker, investigating a ring that was responsible for targeting Syrian refugees. As recently as 2024, four Israeli nationals 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 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 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 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.
[…]
The Most Revolutionary Act 