israel: confirmation of illegal organ harvest

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http://fr.news.yahoo.com/3/20091220/twl-israel-prelevements-organes-951b410.html

see previous posts: http://arthurzbygniew.blogspot.com/2009/09/chamish-israeli-organs-have-also-been.html

http://arthurzbygniew.blogspot.com/2009/08/israel-murder-palestinians-for-their.html

Israël: des organes ont été prélevés sur des corps dans les années 90 sans autorisation, selon un ancien responsable

Dimanche 20 décembre, 20h13

L'ancien chef du principal institut médico-légal israélien a reconnu que des organes avaient été prélevés sur des corps, notamment de Palestiniens, au cours des années 1990 sans l'autorisation des familles des défunts.

Le Dr Jehuda Hiss a fait ces déclarations dans le cadre d'un entretien accordé en 2000 à un universitaire américain. Ce dernier a décidé de ne le rendre public que maintenant en raison d'une controverse qui a éclaté l'été dernier à la suite d'un article d'un journal suédois laissant entendre que des soldats israéliens tuaient des Palestiniens pour faire commerce de leurs organes. Des allégations qu'Israël a vivement démenties.

Dans l'entretien, le Dr Jehuda Hiss précise que des cornées ont été prélevées sur des cadavres sans le consentement des familles.

L'ancien responsable a été renvoyé de l'institut en 2004, et la deuxième chaîne de télévision israélienne a rapporté, en citant le ministère de la Santé, que cette pratique avait cessé il y a dix ans. AP

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http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091220/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_israel_organ_harvesting_2

Israel harvested organs in '90s without permission

By MARK LAVIE, Associated Press Writer Mark Lavie, 2 hrs 10 mins ago

JERUSALEM – Israel has admitted that in the 1990s, its forensic pathologists harvested organs from dead bodies, including Palestinians, without permission of their families.

The issue emerged with publication of an interview with the then-head of Israel's Abu Kabir forensic institute, Dr. Jehuda Hiss. The interview was conducted in 2000 by an American academic, who released it because of a huge controversy last summer over an allegation by a Swedish newspaper that Israel was killing Palestinians in order to harvest their organs. Israel hotly denied the charge.

Parts of the interview were broadcast on Israel's Channel 2 TV over the weekend. In it, Hiss said, "We started to harvest corneas ... Whatever was done was highly informal. No permission was asked from the family."

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.

In a response to the TV report, the Israeli military confirmed that the practice took place. "This activity ended a decade ago and does not happen any longer," the military said in a statement quoted by Channel 2.

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."

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. 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."