Donald Boström om hur palestinier anklagar Israels armé för att stjäla kroppsdelar från sina offer. | Kultur | Aftonbladet
Return of the Body Snatchers
Israel Adam Shamir
In the Turkish blockbuster action movie Valley of the Wolves, an American Jewish doctor in Abu Ghraib prison gently removes a kidney out of live and suffering Arab prisoner and places it into a special vessel with the label “To Tel Aviv”, thus reinforcing the Israeli-American bond of eternal friendship. Real life imitates cinema, as we learn from the dreadful story of Palestinian youths being hunted for their inner organs by that most moral army in the world,Israel 's, as published by a leading Swedish newspaper [read its English translation below]
Donald Boström, a Swedish photographer who worked in the West Bank in 1992, was tipped off by UN officials to follow the bloody trail of Israeli soldiers who had kidnapped young Palestinians and returned their dead bodies five days later “with a slit from the abdomen up to the chin.” The families in the West Bank and in Gaza felt that they knew exactly what had happened: “Our sons were used as involuntary organ donors; they disappeared for a number of days only to be returned in the dark of night, dead and autopsied. Why did they keep their bodies for five days before letting us bury them? What happened to their bodies in the meantime? Why are they performing autopsies, against our will, when the cause of death is obvious? Why were their bodies returned at night time? Why was this done with a military escort? Why was the area closed off during the funeral? Why was the power supply interrupted?”
These questions continued to haunt Boström. He took gruesome pictures of the returned bodies. Like Vanunu, he smuggled his films abroad. When back in Sweden , he offered the story to Dagens Nyheter, a liberal newspaper which, incidentally, is owned by the Jewish Bonnier family. DN refused to publish it. The story was laid to rest until now, when the Social Democrat newspaper Aftonbladet decided to let it run.
In Israel , the reaction was hysterical. The country is in danger of busting its guts in rage. Huge pressure has been exerted upon Swedish authorities to condemn the newspaper, to punish the offending author and to beg forgiveness. The Swedish Ambassador in Tel Aviv, a member of the rich and influential Jewish family Bonnier who incidentally own the majority of Swedish newspapers, TV networks and cinemas, expressed her ‘shock and disapproval’ on a website. Her speedy acceptance of the Tel Aviv diktat misfired. The Swedish government rejected her interference with the freedom of press; the editors of Aftonbladet insisted on their right to say what they find fit and called for an international inquiry.
This proud stance lasted but a day or two. Carl Bildt, the Swedish Foreign Minister, was discomfited by Israel 's intention to cancel his scheduled visit and had already written in a blog that “such articles can cause anti-Semitism, and instigation is against the Swedish law”. However, because he did not cry uncle in the way Netanyahu and Lieberman had demanded, the rage and hysterics in Tel Aviv increased all the more.
It is easier to express ‘outrage about the old canard’ than to answer the questions posed byBostrom. The facts are disturbing, and the accusations are not new. There were too many reports of such goings on, beside the cases mentioned by the Aftonbladet. Knesset Members Ahmed Tibi and Hashem Mahmid accused the Abu Kabir institute of forensic medicine of expropriating the inner parts of Palestinian corpses. They said that Palestinian doctors have complained about receiving the bodies of their dead emptied of their innards. Israeli newspapers reported that in 2007 three Palestinian teenagers were killed near Khan Younesin Gaza Strip and their bodies were returned to their parents all cut and brutalised six days later. Israel often does not even return the dead bodies of Palestinians to their families but has them buried in a secret cemetery. This causes even more suspicions.
Worse, it fits into a larger pattern.
All over the world, Israel and Israelis are involved in trafficking human flesh, this modern form of cannibalism. Beside the case of the New Jersey ring mentioned in the Boström’s article, there are plenty others.
This lack of moral inhibitions allowed a leading Khabbad rabbi, Yitzhak Ginzburg, to give his religious permission to a Jew to take a liver from a goy even without his consent. He said that “a Jew is entitled to extract the liver from a goy if he needs it, for the life of a Jew is more valuable than the life of a goy, likewise the life of a goy is more valuable than the life of an animal.”
Modern Israelis have forgotten their faith, but have retained this lack of inhibition. An Israeli business newspaper, The Marker, has published an opinion piece by an Israeli lawyer justifying the trade in body organs, for “organs are just commodity, and so they can be bought and sold like any commodity in an open market”.
The distance between kidneys bought and snatched is not that big: if organs are “just a commodity”, surely it is permissible to take them from Palestinians, just as it is ‘permitted’ to take from Palestinians centuries-old olive trees while building the Wall.
Indignation is easy, but it is not so easy to prove that the Israelis, who do not hesitate to break arms and legs and pour napalm on schoolchildren, do draw a line about getting some profit from Palestinian innards. Aftonbladet’s demand for an international enquiry is reasonable: if the Israelis have done nothing wrong (beyond murdering hundreds of young men), they have nothing to fear from an international investigation. Yet Israel refused UN enquiry commissions permission to visit Jenin after the 2002 massacre and Gaza after the 2009 massacre.
For Israel , the most upsetting part of this affair was the breach made in the wall. I do not mean the monstrous Sharon ’s Wall protecting the biggest Jewish ghetto in the Middle East , but the wall of media control which protects it overseas. Jews buy media all over the world not for fun, and not for profit, but for the influence it has over minds. This is the case in Sweden , where members of its tiny Jewish community own newspapers, magazines, publishing houses and even Swedish Hollywood - SFI. This media actively promotes the neo-liberal policies of privatisation, commodification, immigrant influx, dismantling the welfare state – in short, policies that are good for wealthy Jews.
Israeli representatives work hard to keep reporting from the Middle East under their control. A few years ago, the leading radical left magazine Ordfront published a thoughtful pieceIsraeli Regime Directs Swedish Media by Johannes Wahlström, telling of Israeli meddling with the Swedish press, of Israeli officials going to newspaper editors and to correspondents. In that article Donald Boström tells of the dreadful story he wanted to tell, but he couldn’t get through the wall of pro-Israeli censorship in the Swedish media.
Israel is not the only country suspected of such nefarious activities. Carla del Ponte, chief prosecutor at the Hague tribunal for Balkan crimes, wrote in her 2008 book The Hunt: Me and War Criminals that under the aegis of the Kosovo Liberation Army, this ally of NATO and the US, hundreds of young Serb prisoners were allegedly taken by truck from Kosovo to northern Albania where their organs were removed. Some prisoners were sewn up after having kidneys removed until the moment they were killed for other vital organs. Carla Del Ponte had seen the house where such surgeries were done and had met with the people involved, one of whom "personally made an organ delivery" to an Albanian airport for transport abroad.
However, Carla del Ponte’s accusation against Albanians did not cause such a stir, and nobody condemned her as “anti-Albanian”, nor would she care if somebody had, for it is perfectly all right to be anti-anybody as long as not anti-Jewish. The Jews have a potent weapon in their “anti-Semitism” label. Or do they?
Could it be that the useful-for-Israel fear of anti-Semitism does not work like a charm anymore? This is possible. The Cairo speech of Obama apparently has had no direct consequences; Obama tried to apply pressure to Israel in order to freeze the settlements, but in vain. Did he fail? It is too early to judge, as Chou En Lai was wont to say. Such changes rarely occur by the wave of a magic wand … they take time. Recent publications on the Jewish criminal gang in New Jersey, attacks on Goldman Sachs, medals for Mary Robinson and Desmond Tutu, an award to Felicia Langer, the collapse of the pro-Jewish socialist party and the appearance of an anti-zionist party in France, the Boström article in Aftonbladet – all are small and separate incidents, but together they imply that the change is coming. Swedes, French, Germans and even New Jerseyans are no longer afraid of Washington coming at them like sixteen tons in defence of Zionists, as would have been the case in the days of George W. Bush. Obama even refused to appoint a new anti-anti-semitic commissar.
This thought frightens the Tel Aviv government more than anything. If today they let the Swedes get away with it, tomorrow there will be somebody else, and then the fear of the Jews will be assigned to the category of unmanly unrealistic fears, like fear of mice.
____________ _________ _________ _________ _________ _________ _________ _
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. FrancisDelmonici, 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 world’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 serious 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 forpostmortal organ donation. Half a million pamphlets were spread in local newspapers. EhudOlmert 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 Palestinian 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 Ahmed 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 Ahmed 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 Bilalonce 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 transportedBilal 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 Mahmud 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? Nafes’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. BilalAhmed 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
THIS IS THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE: http://www.aftonbla det.se/kultur/ article5652583. ab
Donald Boström, a Swedish photographer who worked in the West Bank in 1992, was tipped off by UN officials to follow the bloody trail of Israeli soldiers who had kidnapped young Palestinians and returned their dead bodies five days later “with a slit from the abdomen up to the chin.” The families in the West Bank and in Gaza felt that they knew exactly what had happened: “Our sons were used as involuntary organ donors; they disappeared for a number of days only to be returned in the dark of night, dead and autopsied. Why did they keep their bodies for five days before letting us bury them? What happened to their bodies in the meantime? Why are they performing autopsies, against our will, when the cause of death is obvious? Why were their bodies returned at night time? Why was this done with a military escort? Why was the area closed off during the funeral? Why was the power supply interrupted?”
These questions continued to haunt Boström. He took gruesome pictures of the returned bodies. Like Vanunu, he smuggled his films abroad. When back in Sweden , he offered the story to Dagens Nyheter, a liberal newspaper which, incidentally, is owned by the Jewish Bonnier family. DN refused to publish it. The story was laid to rest until now, when the Social Democrat newspaper Aftonbladet decided to let it run.
In Israel , the reaction was hysterical. The country is in danger of busting its guts in rage. Huge pressure has been exerted upon Swedish authorities to condemn the newspaper, to punish the offending author and to beg forgiveness. The Swedish Ambassador in Tel Aviv, a member of the rich and influential Jewish family Bonnier who incidentally own the majority of Swedish newspapers, TV networks and cinemas, expressed her ‘shock and disapproval’ on a website. Her speedy acceptance of the Tel Aviv diktat misfired. The Swedish government rejected her interference with the freedom of press; the editors of Aftonbladet insisted on their right to say what they find fit and called for an international inquiry.
This proud stance lasted but a day or two. Carl Bildt, the Swedish Foreign Minister, was discomfited by Israel 's intention to cancel his scheduled visit and had already written in a blog that “such articles can cause anti-Semitism, and instigation is against the Swedish law”. However, because he did not cry uncle in the way Netanyahu and Lieberman had demanded, the rage and hysterics in Tel Aviv increased all the more.
It is easier to express ‘outrage about the old canard’ than to answer the questions posed byBostrom. The facts are disturbing, and the accusations are not new. There were too many reports of such goings on, beside the cases mentioned by the Aftonbladet. Knesset Members Ahmed Tibi and Hashem Mahmid accused the Abu Kabir institute of forensic medicine of expropriating the inner parts of Palestinian corpses. They said that Palestinian doctors have complained about receiving the bodies of their dead emptied of their innards. Israeli newspapers reported that in 2007 three Palestinian teenagers were killed near Khan Younesin Gaza Strip and their bodies were returned to their parents all cut and brutalised six days later. Israel often does not even return the dead bodies of Palestinians to their families but has them buried in a secret cemetery. This causes even more suspicions.
Worse, it fits into a larger pattern.
All over the world, Israel and Israelis are involved in trafficking human flesh, this modern form of cannibalism. Beside the case of the New Jersey ring mentioned in the Boström’s article, there are plenty others.
- Turkey: An Israeli professor Zaki Shapira was arrested in Turkey for allegedly cutting into live Turks for spare parts, reported the notoriously anti-Semitic paper Jerusalem Post.
- South Africa: Another anti-Semitic paper, the New York Times, reported on an Israeli trafficking ring active from South Africa to Brazil .
- Brazil: An Israeli officer, Gedalya Tauber, was arrested in Brazil for inducing the poor to part with their body parts. He spilled the beans about activity of his fellow countrymen.
- The Ukraine : The Jerusalem Post reported the arrest of “an Israeli illegal organ-smuggling ring” that flew their donors and recipients to the Ukraine .
This lack of moral inhibitions allowed a leading Khabbad rabbi, Yitzhak Ginzburg, to give his religious permission to a Jew to take a liver from a goy even without his consent. He said that “a Jew is entitled to extract the liver from a goy if he needs it, for the life of a Jew is more valuable than the life of a goy, likewise the life of a goy is more valuable than the life of an animal.”
Modern Israelis have forgotten their faith, but have retained this lack of inhibition. An Israeli business newspaper, The Marker, has published an opinion piece by an Israeli lawyer justifying the trade in body organs, for “organs are just commodity, and so they can be bought and sold like any commodity in an open market”.
The distance between kidneys bought and snatched is not that big: if organs are “just a commodity”, surely it is permissible to take them from Palestinians, just as it is ‘permitted’ to take from Palestinians centuries-old olive trees while building the Wall.
Indignation is easy, but it is not so easy to prove that the Israelis, who do not hesitate to break arms and legs and pour napalm on schoolchildren, do draw a line about getting some profit from Palestinian innards. Aftonbladet’s demand for an international enquiry is reasonable: if the Israelis have done nothing wrong (beyond murdering hundreds of young men), they have nothing to fear from an international investigation. Yet Israel refused UN enquiry commissions permission to visit Jenin after the 2002 massacre and Gaza after the 2009 massacre.
For Israel , the most upsetting part of this affair was the breach made in the wall. I do not mean the monstrous Sharon ’s Wall protecting the biggest Jewish ghetto in the Middle East , but the wall of media control which protects it overseas. Jews buy media all over the world not for fun, and not for profit, but for the influence it has over minds. This is the case in Sweden , where members of its tiny Jewish community own newspapers, magazines, publishing houses and even Swedish Hollywood - SFI. This media actively promotes the neo-liberal policies of privatisation, commodification, immigrant influx, dismantling the welfare state – in short, policies that are good for wealthy Jews.
Israeli representatives work hard to keep reporting from the Middle East under their control. A few years ago, the leading radical left magazine Ordfront published a thoughtful pieceIsraeli Regime Directs Swedish Media by Johannes Wahlström, telling of Israeli meddling with the Swedish press, of Israeli officials going to newspaper editors and to correspondents. In that article Donald Boström tells of the dreadful story he wanted to tell, but he couldn’t get through the wall of pro-Israeli censorship in the Swedish media.
Israel is not the only country suspected of such nefarious activities. Carla del Ponte, chief prosecutor at the Hague tribunal for Balkan crimes, wrote in her 2008 book The Hunt: Me and War Criminals that under the aegis of the Kosovo Liberation Army, this ally of NATO and the US, hundreds of young Serb prisoners were allegedly taken by truck from Kosovo to northern Albania where their organs were removed. Some prisoners were sewn up after having kidneys removed until the moment they were killed for other vital organs. Carla Del Ponte had seen the house where such surgeries were done and had met with the people involved, one of whom "personally made an organ delivery" to an Albanian airport for transport abroad.
However, Carla del Ponte’s accusation against Albanians did not cause such a stir, and nobody condemned her as “anti-Albanian”, nor would she care if somebody had, for it is perfectly all right to be anti-anybody as long as not anti-Jewish. The Jews have a potent weapon in their “anti-Semitism” label. Or do they?
Could it be that the useful-for-Israel fear of anti-Semitism does not work like a charm anymore? This is possible. The Cairo speech of Obama apparently has had no direct consequences; Obama tried to apply pressure to Israel in order to freeze the settlements, but in vain. Did he fail? It is too early to judge, as Chou En Lai was wont to say. Such changes rarely occur by the wave of a magic wand … they take time. Recent publications on the Jewish criminal gang in New Jersey, attacks on Goldman Sachs, medals for Mary Robinson and Desmond Tutu, an award to Felicia Langer, the collapse of the pro-Jewish socialist party and the appearance of an anti-zionist party in France, the Boström article in Aftonbladet – all are small and separate incidents, but together they imply that the change is coming. Swedes, French, Germans and even New Jerseyans are no longer afraid of Washington coming at them like sixteen tons in defence of Zionists, as would have been the case in the days of George W. Bush. Obama even refused to appoint a new anti-anti-semitic commissar.
This thought frightens the Tel Aviv government more than anything. If today they let the Swedes get away with it, tomorrow there will be somebody else, and then the fear of the Jews will be assigned to the category of unmanly unrealistic fears, like fear of mice.
Second Ending
More importantly, Israeli outrage is a proof that - despite approval for it by radical Cabbalists and neoliberals - transplantation of human organs is an immoral dreadful thing, too close to cannibalism, and we all know that. Yes, it is awful if Israeli soldiers tear kidneys out of Palestinians and kill them afterwards. But it is equally awful, if a kind doctor removes a kidney out of a Detroit mechanic whose house was repossessed by a gentle banker, or out of a Ukrainian worker who was sacked by a polite oligarch, or out of an Indian farmer who has to pay his debt to Monsanto. Every poor man on the planet is a Palestinian – though the means of his dispossession may vary. This kind of thing should be stopped. The human body is sacred. These operations are too expensive and can’t be justified. Mankind should overcome its fear of death. We live and we die. There is no reason to waste thousands of dollars prolonging a life by expensive operations if this money can be used for feeding the starving. More about this later...____________ _________ _________ _________ _________ _________ _________ _
An English translation of the famous article in a leading Swedish paper.
Our sons plundered for their organs
By Donald Boström
You could call me a “matchmaker,” said Levy Yitzhak 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. FrancisDelmonici, 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 world’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 serious 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 forpostmortal organ donation. Half a million pamphlets were spread in local newspapers. EhudOlmert 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 Palestinian 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 Ahmed 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 Ahmed 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 Bilalonce 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 transportedBilal 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 Mahmud 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? Nafes’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. BilalAhmed 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
THIS IS THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE: http://www.aftonbla det.se/kultur/ article5652583. ab
”Våra söner plundras på sina organ”
Palestinier anklagar Israels armé för att stjäla kroppsdelar från sina offer. Här berättar Donald Boström om den internationella transplantationsskandalen – och hur han själv blev vittne till övergrepp på en 19-årig pojke.
Jag är vad ni kan kalla en ”matchmaker”, saLevy Izhak Rosenbaum från Brooklyn, USA, i en hemlig inspelning med en FBI-agent som han trodde var en kund. Tio dagar senare, i slutet på juli i år arresterades Rosenbaum i samband med att en stor korruptionshärva avslöjades i New Jersey: rabbiner, folkvalda och betrodda tjänstemän hade i åratal sysslat med pengatvätt och illegal organhandel, vilket nu rullades upp likt ett Sopranos nätverk. Rosenbaums matchmaking handlade allltså inte om romantik, utan om att köpa och sälja njurar från Israel på svarta marknaden. Enligt egen utsago köper han organen från mindre bemedlade människor i Israel för 10 000 dollar och säljer dem till desperata patienter i USA för 160 000 dollar. Den lagliga väntetiden för njurar är i medeltal nio år.
Anklagelserna har skakat om amerikansk transplantationsindustri. Om detta är sant, är det första gången organtrafficking dokumenteras i USA, säger experter i tidningen New Jersey Real-Time News.
På frågan hur många organ han sålt svarar Rosenbaum: Quite a lot. Många. Och jag har aldrig misslyckats, skryter han vidare. Hans verksamhet har pågått under mycket lång tid.
Francis Delmonici, Harvardprofessor i transplantationskirurgi, och styrelsemedlem i National Kidney Foundation’s Board of Directors, säger i samma tidning att liknande organtrafficking som i Israel pågår också på andra ställen i världen. Uppskattningsvis är det 10 procent av de 63 000 njurtransplantationerna i världen som görs illegalt, säger Delmonici.
Heta länder för den här illegala verksamheten är Pakistan, Filippinerna och Kina, där man tror att organen tas från avrättade fångar. Men starka misstankar finns också hos palestinier att deras unga män har fångats in, och som i Kina och Pakistan ofrivilligt fått agera organreserv innan de dödats. En mycket allvarlig misstanke som har tillräckligt många frågetecken för att ICJ, International Court of Justice, absolut borde inleda en undersökning om huruvida det handlar om israeliska krigsförbrytelser.
Israel har återkommande hamnat i blåsväder för sitt oetiska sätt att handskas med organ och transplantation. Länder som bland annat Frankrike avbröt organsamarbetet med Israel redan på nittiotalet, ochJerusalem Post skrev ”att övriga länder i Europa väntas följa Frankrikes exempel inom kort”.
Hälften av de nya njurar som israeler fått inopererade sedan början på 2000-talet har köpts illegalt från Turkiet, Östeuropa eller Latinamerika. Israeliska hälsovårdsmyndigheter har full kännedom om verksamheten, men gör inget för att stoppa den. 2003 framkom vid en konferens att Israel är det enda västlandet vars läkarkår inte fördömer den illegala organhandeln eller vidtar några rättsliga åtgärder mot de läkare som deltar i den brottsliga hanteringen. Tvärtom är chefsläkare på de stora sjukhusen inblandade i de flesta illegala transplantationerna, enligt Dagens Nyheter (5 december 2003).
I ett försök att komma tillrätta med organbristen i landet gick Israels dåvarande hälsominister, Ehud Olmert, ut i en stor kampanj sommaren 1992 för att få den israeliska befolkningen att ställa upp som organdonatorer. En halv miljon pamfletter spreds i lokaltidningarna där medborgarna uppmanades skriva på att donera sina organ efter sin död. Ehud Olmert var själv den första att skriva på.
Redan ett par veckor efter skrev Jerusalem Post att kampanjen gett ett lyckat resultat. Inte mindre är 35 000 personer hade skrivit på, vanligen är det 500 i månaden. I samma artikel skrev journalisten Judy Siegel att gapet mellan tillgång och efterfrågan fortfarande var stort. Kön till njurtransplantationer var 500 personer, men endast 124 personer kunde opereras. Av 45 personer i behov av en ny lever hade endast tre personer möjligheten att kunna opereras i Israel.
Samtidigt som denna organkampanj pågick försvann unga palestinska män som levererades tillbaka nattetid till sina byar fem dygn senare, döda och uppsprättade.
Talet om de uppsprättade kropparna förskräckte befolkningen på Västbanken och Gaza. Det talades om en dramatisk ökning av unga män som försvann, med därpå följande nattliga begravningar av obducerade unga män.
Jag var i området och arbetade med en bok när jag ett antal gånger blev kontaktad av FN-anställda som var oroade över utvecklingen. De som kontaktade mig menade att organstöld faktiskt ägde rum, men att de var förhindrade att agera. På uppdrag av ett tv-bolag reste jag därefter runt och talade med ett stort antal palestinska familjer på Västbanken och Gaza som menade att deras söner blivit bestulna på organ innan de dödades. Ett av de exempel jag träffade på under denna kusliga resa var den unge stenkastaren Bilal Achmed Ghanan.
Klockan närmade sig midnatt när motorljuden från den israeliska miltärkolonnen hördes i utkanten av den lilla byn Imatin på norra Västbanken. Byns tvåtusen invånare höll sig mangrant vakna och stod som tysta skuggor i mörkret. Några låg på hustaken, andra stod bakom sina gardiner, hus eller träd som gav skydd i mörkret under utegångsförbudet men ändå erbjöd fri sikt mot det som skulle bli gravplats åt byns första martyr. Militären hade brutit all elektricitet runt byn och området var avstängt militärt område – inte en katt kunde röra sig utomhus utan att riskera livet. Mörkrets bedövande tystnad bröts bara av stillsamma snyftningar och jag minns inte om det var av kyla eller spänning vi huttrade. Fem dagar tidigare, den 13 maj 1992, hade en israelisk specialstyrka lagt sig i bakhåll i byns snickeri. Personen som specialstyrkan hade i uppdrag att oskadliggöra var 19-årige Bilal Achmed Ghanan, en av de aktiva palestinska stenkastande ungdomar som gjorde livet surt för israels ockupationsmakt.
Bilal Ghanan var som en av de ledande stenkastarna efterlyst sedan ett par år. Det innebar att han tillsammans med andra efterlysta stenkastargrabbar bodde under bar himmel uppe i Nablusbergen. Att bli infångad betydde döden, och alla berättelser om den föregående tortyren gjorde inte saken bättre. Således höll de sig i bergen. Men av någon anledning tog Bilal sig ner från bergen en dag och vandrade oskyddad genom byn förbi snickarens hus denna olycksaliga dag i mitten på maj. Varför han kom ner just denna dag kunde inte ens Talal, hans äldre bror svara på, kanske var maten slut och förråden behövde fyllas på.
Allting gick planenligt för den israeliska specialstyrkan. De fimpade cigaretterna, lade ifrån sig Coca-Cola-burkarna och siktade i lugn och ro genom det trasiga fönstret. När Bilal var tillräckligt nära var det bara att trycka av. Det första skottet träffade i bröstet. Enligt bybor som bevittnade händelsen sköts han sedan med ett skott i var ben. Därefter sprang två soldater ner från snickeriet och sköt honom ytterligare en gång i magen. Slutligen tog de Bilal i fötterna och släpade honom de 20 stegen uppför snickeriets stentrappa. Byborna berättar sedan att folk från både FN och Röda Halvmånen som befann sig i närheten och hört skottlossningen hade begett sig till platsen för att ta hand om den skadade. Argumentationen om vem som skulle ta hand om offret slutade med att den israeliska styrkan lastat in den svårt skadade Bilal i en jeep och kört iväg till byns utkant. Där väntande en militärhelikopter som forslade iväg Bilal mot ett för hans anhöriga okänt mål.
Fem dygn senare kom han tillbaka i mörkret, död och inlindad i gröna sjukhustyger. När militärkolonnen som hämtat Bilal från obduktionscentrat Abu Kabir utanför Tel Aviv stannar vid platsen för Bilals sista vila kände någon igen den israeliske militära ledaren för gruppen som kapten Yahya. ”Den svåraste av dem alla” viskade personen i mörkret i mitt öra. När kapten Yahyas mannar lastat av kroppen och bytt det gröna tyget mot ett ljust bomullstyg, valdes några manliga släktingar för att utföra jobbet – att gräva jord och blanda cement.
Tillsammans med de skarpa ljuden från spadarna hördes enstaka skratt från soldaterna som i väntan på att få åka hem drog några vitsar för varandra. När Bilal läggs ner i graven blottades hans bröst och plötsligt stod det klart för de få närvarande vilka övergrepp han utsatts för. Bilal var långt ifrån den förste som begravdes uppskuren från buken upp till hakan och spekulationerna om avsikten hade tagit fart.
De drabbade palestinska familjerna på Västbanken och Gaza var säkra på vad som hänt deras söner. Våra söner används som ofrivilliga organdonatorer, sa släktingar till Khaled från Nablus till mig, liksom mamman till Raed från Jenin och morbröderna till Machmod och Nafesfrån Gaza, som samtliga varit försvunna ett antal dygn och kommit tillbaka nattetid, döda och obducerade.
– Varför kvarhåller de annars kropparna upp till fem dygn innan vi får begrava dem? Vad hände med kropparna under tiden? Och varför blir de obducerade när dödsorsaken är uppenbar, och i samtliga fall mot vår vilja? Och varför kommer kropparna tillbaka nattetid? Och varför med militäreskort? Och varför stängs områdena av under begravningen? Och varför bryts elektriciteten? Frågorna var många och upprörda från Nafes morbror.
De anhöriga till de dödade palestinska männen hyste inte längre några tvivel om saken.
Talesmannen för den israeliska armén menade tvärtom att påståenden om organstöld var påhitt av palestinier. Alla palestinier som dödats blir rutinmässigt obducerade, menar han.
Bilal Achmed Ghanem var en av 133 palestinier som dödades på olika sätt det året. Enligt den Palestinska statistiken var dödorsakerna följande: Skjuten på gatan, explosion, misshandel, tårgas, avsiktligt påkörd, hängd i fängelset, skjuten i skolan, dödad i bostaden etcetera. Av de 133 dödade personerna i åldrarna fyra månader till 88 år var det 69 stycken som obducerades, det vill säga endast hälften av de döda. Den rutinmässiga obduktionen av dödade palestinier, som arméns talesman talat om stämmer inte i verkligheten på de ockuperade områdena. Frågorna kvarstår.
Vi vet att behovet av organ i Israel är stort, att en omfattande illegal organhandel pågår, att det skett under lång tid, att det sker med myndigheternas goda minne, att högt uppsatta läkare på de stora sjukhusen deltar, liksom tjänstemän på olika nivåer. Och vi vet att palestinska unga män försvann, att de fördes tillbaka fem dygn senare under hemlighetsmakeri på natten, uppsprättade och hopsydda.
Dags att bringa klarhet i denna makabra verksamhet om vad som försiggår och vad som försiggått på de av Israel ockuperade områdena sedan intifadan startade.
"Our sons plundered for their organs"
Palestinians accuse the Israeli army of stealing body parts from his victims. Here, Donald Boströmabout the international transplant scandal - and how he witnessed the assault on a 19 year old boy.
Donald Boström
I am what you might call a "matchmaker," said Levy Izhak Rosenbaum of Brooklyn, USA, in a secret recording with an FBI agent he thought was a customer. Ten days later, at the end of July this year, Rosenbaum was arrested in connection with a large tangle of corruption uncovered in New Jersey: rabbis, elected and trusted officials had for years engaged in money laundering and illegal organ trade, which now rolled up like a Sopranos network. Rosenbaum's matchmaking was allltså not about romance, but about buying and selling kidneys from Israel on the black market. By his own admission, he buys bodies from the needy people in Israel for $ 10 000 and selling them to desperate patients in the U.S. for 160 000 dollars. The legal waiting time for kidneys is an average of nine years.
I am what you might call a "matchmaker," said Levy Izhak Rosenbaum of Brooklyn, USA, in a secret recording with an FBI agent he thought was a customer. Ten days later, at the end of July this year, Rosenbaum was arrested in connection with a large tangle of corruption uncovered in New Jersey: rabbis, elected and trusted officials had for years engaged in money laundering and illegal organ trade, which now rolled up like a Sopranos network. Rosenbaum's matchmaking was allltså not about romance, but about buying and selling kidneys from Israel on the black market. By his own admission, he buys bodies from the needy people in Israel for $ 10 000 and selling them to desperate patients in the U.S. for 160 000 dollars. The legal waiting time for kidneys is an average of nine years.
The accusations have shaken the American transplant industry. If this is true, it is the first time organ trafficking documented in the United States, experts said the magazine New Jersey Real-Time News .
Asked how many organs he has sold Rosenbaum responds: Quite a lot.Many. And I have never failed, he boasts. His work has been going on for a very long time.
Francis Delmonici , Harvard Professor of Transplant Surgery and director of the National Kidney Foundation's Board of Directors, said in the same newspaper that similar organ trafficking in Israel are also underway in other parts of the world. It is estimated that 10 percent of the 63,000 kidney transplants in the world that is made illegal, says Delmonici.
Hot countries for this illegal activity are Pakistan, the Philippines and China, where it is believed that the organs from executed prisoners. But also harbor strong suspicions among Palestinians that their young men have been captured, and that China and Pakistan had involuntarily act organ reserve killed. A very serious accusation, with enough question marks to the ICJ, International Court of Justice, absolutely should launch an investigation as to whether it is about Israeli war crimes.
Israel has repeatedly been under fire for its unethical ways of dealing with organs and transplants. Countries such as France suspended organ collaboration with Israel in the nineties, and the Jerusalem Post wrote that "the rest of European countries are expected to follow France's example shortly."
Half of the kidneys transplanted to Israelis had implanted since the early 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. 2003 showed a conference that Israel is the only western country with a medical profession does not condemn the illegal organ trade or take any legal action against the doctors involved in the criminal process. On the contrary, chief medical officer at the major hospitals involved in most of the illegal transplants, according to Dagens Nyheter (5 December 2003).
In an attempt to overcome the organ shortage in the country was Israel's then health minister, Ehud Olmert , out of a big campaign in summer 1992 for the Israeli population to set up as organ donors. Half a million pamphlets were spread in local newspapers where citizens were invited to write in to donate their organs after their death. Ehud Olmert was the first to sign.
Only a few weeks later the Jerusalem Post that the campaign was a success. No fewer than 35,000 people had signed on, usually it is 500 a month. In the same article wrote journalist Judy Siegel that the gap between supply and demand was still high. Sex for kidney transplants was 500 people, 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 this organ campaign was going disappeared young Palestinian men who came back at night to their villages five days later, dead and ripped.
Talk of the ripped bodies terrified the population of the West Bank and Gaza. There was talk of a dramatic increase of young men who disappeared, with ensuing nightly funerals of autopsied young men.
I was in the area and worked on a book when I repeatedly was approached by UN staff concerned about the developments. The persons contacting me said that organ theft definitely occurred but that they were unable to act. On behalf of a television company I then traveled around interviewing a great number of Palestinian families in the West Bank and Gaza who claimed that their sons had been deprived of organs before being killed. One example that I encountered on this eerie trip was the young stone breaker Bilal Achmed Ghanaian .
It was close to midnight when the motor roar from an Israeli military column sounded from the outskirts of the small village Imatin in the northern West Bank. The village's two thousand inhabitants remained massively wake up and stood as silent shadows in the dark. Some lay on rooftops, others stood behind their curtains, buildings, or trees that provided protection during the curfew but still offered a full view toward what would become the grave for the village's first martyr. The military had interrupted the electricity and the area was closed military zone - not a cat could move outdoors without risking their lives. Darkness deafening silence was broken only by the quiet sobbing and I do not remember if it was the cold or excitement we shivered. Five days earlier, on May 13, 1992, an Israeli special forces ambushed in the village's carpentry. The person they were assigned to incapacitate was 19-year-old Bilal Achmed Ghana, one of the most active Palestinian stone-throwing youths who made life difficult for the Israeli occupying power.
Bilal Ghana was one of the leading stone throwers called for a couple of years. It meant that he, together with other stone throwing boys lived under the sky up in Nablusbergen. To be captured meant death, and all the stories of the previous torture did not help. They had to stay in the mountains. But for some reason took Bilal down from the mountains one day and wandered unchecked through the village past the carpenter's house this ill-fated day in mid-May. Why he came down on this particular day could not even Talal , his older brother to answer, maybe it was out of food and needed to restock.
Everything went according to plan for the Israeli special forces. The stubbed-out cigarettes, put away the Coca-Cola cans and aimed at leisure through the broken window. When Bilal was close enough they needed only to pull the trigger. The first shot hit 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 him once in the stomach. Finally they took Bilal to his feet and dragged him the 20 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 the scene to take care of the injured. The argument about who would take care of the victim ended with Israeli soldiers loading the badly wounded Bilal in a jeep and drove off to the village's outskirts.There, waiting for a military helicopter that whisked away Bilal against an unknown to his family goals.
Five days later , he came back in the dark, dead and wrapped in green hospital fabric. When the military column who had transported Bilal from the postmortem center Abu Kabir, outside of Tel Aviv, to the site of his final resting knew someone again the Israeli military leader of the group that Captain Yahya . "The hardest of them all" person whispered in the darkness of my ear. After Yahya had unloaded the body and changed the green fabric for a light cotton one, some male relatives to perform the job - that digging and mixing cement.
Together with the sharp noises from the shovels we could hear laughter from the soldiers who were in waiting to go home, exchanged some jokes together. When Bilal was put in the grave his chest was uncovered and suddenly it became clear to the few present what abuse he suffered. Bilal was far from the first person buried with a slit from his abdomen up to his chin and the speculations about the intention had taken off.
The affected Palestinian families in the West Bank and Gaza were sure what happened to their sons. Our sons are used as involuntary organ donors, said relatives of Khaled from Nablus told me, as did the mother ofRaed from Jenin and the uncles of Machmod and Nafes from Gaza, who had all disappeared for a number of days and come back 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? And why are they performing autopsy when the cause of death is obvious, and in all cases against our will? Why are the bodies returned at night? And so with a military escort? And why is the area closed off during the funeral? And why is the electricity interrupted? The questions were upset and Nafes uncle.
The relatives of the dead Palestinians no longer harbored any doubts about the matter.
The spokesman for the Israeli army claimed that the allegations of organ theft were lies. All Palestinians killed are routinely autopsied, he says.
Bilal Achmed Ghanem was one of 133 Palestinians killed in various ways that year. According to Palestinian statistics causes of death were: shot in the street, explosion, tear gas, deliberately run over, hanged in prison, shot in school, killed at home etcetera. Of the 133 people killed were between four months to 88 years were 69 of them who were autopsied, that is only half of the dead. The routine autopsy of killed Palestinians, which the army spokesman told is not true in reality in the occupied territories. The questions remain.
We know that the need for organs in Israel is large, that an extensive illegal trade of organs, that there has been for a long time, that it is done with the blessing of the authorities, and that doctors at the big hospitals participate, as well as officials at various levels. And we know that young Palestinian men disappeared, that they were brought back after five days in secrecy at night, ripped and sewn together.
Time to bring clarity to this macabre business of what is happening and what is going on in the Israeli-occupied territories since the intifada began.
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