Jerusalem: Adding up yet another feather to its war crimes, Israel has confessed of having used the organs of dead Palestinians for transplantation, without the permission of their families.

This hidden fact revealed when the Israel’s abu kabir forensic center head, Dr. Jehuda Hiss was interviewed by an American academic in the year 2000. Due to the much hue and cry about Israels ruthless killing of Palestinians for using their organs to harvest it in medical surgeries. This claim was initially denied by the Israeli government.

Hiss said, “We started to harvest corneas … Whatever was done was highly informal. No permission was asked from the family.” in the interview which was broadcast in parts on Israel’s Channel 2 TV.

The Channel 2 report said that in the 1990s, forensic specialists at Abu Kabir harvested skin, corneas, heart valves and bones from the bodies of Israeli soldiers, Israeli citizens, Palestinians and foreign workers, often without permission from relatives.

Israeli military agreed and confirmed that this really too place and that this activity has been ended a decade ago, in a response to the TV report

Many of the details in the interview first came to light in 2004, when Hiss was dismissed as head of the forensic institute because of irregularities over use of organs there.In the interview, Hiss described how his doctors would mask the removal of corneas from bodies. “We’d glue the eyelid shut,” he said. “We wouldn’t take corneas from families we knew would open the eyelids.”

Israel’s attorney general dropped criminal charges against him, and Hiss still works as chief pathologist at the institute. He had no comment on the TV report.

Complaints against the institute, where autopsies of dead bodies are performed, at the time of Hiss’ dismissal came from relatives of Israeli soldiers and civilians as well as Palestinians. The bodies belonged to people who died from various causes, including diseases, accidents and Israeli-Palestinian violence, but there has been no evidence to back up the claim in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet that Israeli soldiers killed Palestinians for their organs. Angry Israeli officials called the report “anti-Semitic.”

The academic, Nancy Sheppard-Hughes, a professor of anthropology at the University of California-Berkeley, said she decided to make the interview public in the wake of the Aftonbladet controversy, which raised diplomatic tensions between Israel and Sweden and prompted Sweden’s foreign minister to call off a visit to the Jewish state.

Sheppard-Hughes said that while Palestinians were “by a long shot” not the only ones affected by the practice in the 1990s, she felt the interview must be made public now because “the symbolism, you know, of taking skin of the population considered to be the enemy, (is) something, just in terms of its symbolic weight, that has to be reconsidered.”

While insisting that all organ harvesting was done with permission, Israel’s Health Ministry told Channel 2, “The guidelines at that time were not clear.” It added, “For the last 10 years, Abu Kabir has been working according to ethics and Jewish law.”

[Source: Ibnlive]