Tel Aviv’s display of kidney-donation virtue cannot whitewash the Palestinian corpses, forensic warnings, and human trafficking scandals that still demand attention.
Robert Inlakesh
On January 25, Israeli President Isaac Herzog stood before a crowd celebrating what Tel Aviv called a world record for kidney donations. The event, promoted following a lobbying campaign with Guinness World Records, was intended to demonstrate generosity, discipline, and moral purpose.
However, Guinness only listed the assembly itself as a record – not the kidney donations that Tel Aviv had turned into a PR show.
The bodies behind the numbers
In the Gaza Strip, where Israel returned Palestinian bodies in bags—some decomposed, mutilated, or showing signs of surgical intervention—the ceremony was perceived differently. For Palestinian health officials, the question was not how Israel had managed to generate so many donors, but whether all these bodies had even consented.
Israel’s “propaganda facade” was challenged by none other than Dr. Munir al-Bursh, the Director General of the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza. He said that Israel’s “record numbers” raised serious questions about the origin of the kidneys and other organs now being celebrated. He pointed to the stark contradiction of an occupying state that for years held Palestinian corpses in “cemeteries of numbers” and cold storage facilities while simultaneously presenting itself to the world as a humanitarian model for organ donation.
Bursh cited documented cases of bodies being returned to families without organs—particularly kidneys—without medical reports, autopsy records, or any legal avenue for accountability. He called for an independent international investigation into whether Israel’s purported achievements were built on the theft of Palestinian organs.
Just over a week later, Israel returned the scattered remains of approximately 54 Palestinians to Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. Forensic teams immediately began work to identify the bodies and provide reassurance to the families, but noted that many of the bodies showed clear signs of torture and surgical organ removal.
This was not the first such warning since Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. Allegations of organ harvesting surfaced just ten days after the start of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. In 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 harvesting, including missing cochleae and corneas, as well as other vital organs such as livers, kidneys, and hearts.”
Israel and its defenders attempted to suppress the dissemination of these accusations by invoking “blood libel” and antisemitism. Because the evidence originated from Palestinians, calls for an international investigation largely fell on deaf ears.
A scandal that Israel never buried.
This is exactly what happened in the early 1990s, when Palestinian doctors and relatives of the deceased accused Israel of illegal organ harvesting during the First Intifada. In fact, the then Israeli Health Minister Ehud Olmert organized a public campaign for organ donation as early as 1992. As is the case today, the aim was to project a humanitarian image.
In 1999, US anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes began to uncover what had long been ignored. As co-founder of Organs Watch – an organization to monitor organ trafficking and its human costs – she brought the issue before a subcommittee of the US Congress in 2001.
The breakthrough came with her published interview with Yehuda Hiss, the chief pathologist of the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute – the only Israeli institution allowed to perform autopsies in cases of unnatural death.
Hiss admitted that Abu Kabir had removed organs from Palestinian corpses without consent.
The official Israeli account, based on an internal investigation, claimed that the organ harvesting did not specifically target Palestinians, but that Israeli soldiers were also victims. However, Israel’s Channel 2 broadcast a documentary about the case and interviewed pathologists from Abu Kabir, one of whom explicitly stated: “We never harvested skin from Israeli soldiers, but from the others.”
Sheper-Hughes declared in 2009 that a large portion of the world’s illegal kidney trade could be traced back to Israelis. “Israel is number one,” she said, claiming, “it has tentacles that extend worldwide.” She reported that Israeli citizens—often compensated by the Ministry of Health and in a project supported by the Ministry of Defense—were responsible for massive transplant tourism.
Israelis have exploited vulnerable populations from Brazil to the Philippines. A BBC report from 2001 even described a situation in which “hundreds of Israelis have created a production line that starts in the villages of Moldova, where men today walk around with only one kidney.”
In a controversial article for its time, the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet published claims in 2009 that Palestinians had been deliberately killed by the Israeli military for their organs.
Although Israel and its supporters like to portray this entire scandal as an isolated series of incidents, Hiss and his colleagues at Abu Kabir, who publicly admitted to organ harvesting, were not even punished. Hiss was not sentenced to a long prison term; in fact, he was allowed to continue working at Abu Kabir.
In other words, there was never any real accountability – merely an internal Israeli investigation, followed by promises from the Israeli army and government that they would no longer harvest organs from Palestinians.
The figures 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 laws against organ trafficking. Jerusalem, where the organization is based, became Israel’s leading city for altruistic kidney donations. Tel Aviv claims that Matnat Chaim has performed more than 2,000 transplants, thus achieving the record celebrated in January.
The available data raises obvious questions.
Between 2009 and 2021, Matnat Chaim stated that it had performed 1,000 transplants. In 2022, the non-profit organization reported facilitating 202 transplants – down from 215 the previous year. This means that the publicly available total before the allegations of November 2023 was 1,277. To reach 2,000, the organization would have had to perform an additional 723 transplants in just over three years.
According to Israel’s National Transplant Center, the total number of living donor transplants for the years 2023, 2024, and 2025 was 923. In 2022—the last year with publicly available data on Matnat Chaim’s specific share—the organization accounted for 63 percent of living donor transplants. Had this share remained constant, their share over those three years would have been around 581 transplants—significantly below the 2,000 mark.
That alone doesn’t incriminate Matnat Chaim. But it explains why Bursh didn’t simply accept the claim – especially in the shadow of Israel’s long history of organ harvesting and the testimonies from hospitals in Gaza.
Another interesting point that supports skepticism regarding Israel’s extremely high figures is that only 14 percent of the population has signed the Adi (Ehud) Ben-Dror donor card. This places Israel among the lowest figures of all developed countries. In most Western countries, the average is around 30 percent of the population.
Organ donation has long been a controversial issue among Israelis. For example, in 1931, the Chief Rabbi of British-occupied Palestine declared that the notion that the practice desecrated the dead was “unique to Jews… Non-Jews would have no particular reason to avoid it if there is a natural purpose for it, such as medical reasons.”
In 1996, the influential Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh of the Chabad-Lubavitch sect explained, if a Jew needed a liver: “Can you take the liver of an innocent non-Jew who happens to be passing by to save him? The Torah would probably allow that. Jewish life has infinite value. There is something infinitely holier and more unique about Jewish life than about non-Jewish life.”
While the current public position of Israel’s highest religious authorities is that organ donation is permitted for Jews, this consensus is relatively new. The number of Jewish donors only increased significantly in the last decade. For many strictly observant Jews, the issue remains controversial.
This societal context, combined with Israel’s relatively small population, makes it all the more suspicious that the Israel National Skin Bank is considered one of the largest – if not the largest – skin banks in the world. The INSB is jointly operated by the Israeli Ministry of Health and the military.
Desecration as politics
Israel has long treated Palestinian bodies as instruments of control. In 2017, Tel Aviv admitted to losing track of the bodies of Palestinian political prisoners who died in custody. The statement pointed to the Israeli practice of burying Palestinians in unmarked graves in so-called “cemeteries of numbers”—a cruel method used to deny families the whereabouts of their loved ones. Palestinians also raised concerns that organs had been harvested from some of the missing bodies.
Outside of Palestine, Israelis have repeatedly been linked to organ trafficking scandals worldwide.
The only person ever convicted of organ trafficking in the US was an Israeli named Levy Izhak Rosenbaum. US District Judge Anne Thompson in New Jersey described him as a black market “profiteer” who “traded 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 accused of running an organ trafficking ring. Their abusive system was described as a “form of modern slavery” in which vulnerable people in developing countries were exploited for their organs. The case revealed an uncomfortable contradiction for the Israeli justice system: behavior that was now being prosecuted had been effectively tolerated by state structures just two years earlier.
In 2015, Turkish authorities arrested a suspected Israeli organ trafficker and investigated a ring that had specifically targeted Syrian refugees. As recently as 2024, four Israeli citizens were arrested by Turkish police in a raid against another ring that also exploited Syrian refugees and other disadvantaged groups in Turkey.
In 2018, police in Cyprus arrested Israeli citizen Moshe Harel, accusing him of running a global organ trafficking ring – a scandal dating back to 2008 when a Turkish man collapsed at Pristina airport in visible pain after having a kidney removed. Harel had previously been arrested by Israeli authorities in 2012 but later released.
The aforementioned cases are now considered illegal under Israeli law. However, there was a time when Israelis traveling abroad for organ donation were not only tolerated but effectively encouraged. This history explains why Israeli citizens continue to appear in organ trafficking scandals across various continents. The Israeli Ministry of Health itself helped foster a culture in which the bodies of the poor, the displaced, and the occupied could be treated as medical supplies.
Why no investigation?
Despite this documented history, Western institutions continue to support the Israeli military. Last October, the University of Southern California was exposed after selling 32 human remains to the US military, which were then 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 supply chain serving an army that was committing genocide in Gaza.
A month later, new allegations of organ harvesting surfaced from doctors in the Gaza Strip. This occurred in connection with the return of a number of bodies to Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis, where one doctor said: “The bodies arrived stuffed with cotton, with gaps indicating that organs had been removed. What we saw is indescribable.”
Given the wealth of evidence and allegations suggesting that Israel systematically harvested organs during its genocide, the question arises as to why no independent international investigation has been launched to date.
As was the case in the early 1990s, Palestinian evidence is once again being buried under Western political protection, the fear of retaliation from the Israel lobby, and the tacit assumption that Israeli institutions might investigate themselves.
