The European Palestinian Youth Union alleged on Jan. 21 that most Palestinian prisoners who return to Gaza from Israel are missing organs, accusing the Jewish state of trafficking.
The youth union alleged that “most of the prisoners who have been returned to Gaza have been cut from the chest down to the abdomen, with missing organs and cotton filling.”
As part of the October ceasefire that ended the two-year war with Hamas in Gaza, Israel released nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners, many of them filmed leaving, while 20 hostages were returned from captivity in Gaza. The EPYU did not specify whether it was referring to this group.
“Where are the missing organs?” the group asked, citing a “scandal of the Abu Kabir facility at Israel’s National Institute of Forensic Medicine in the late 1990s.”
Israel confirmed in 2010 that medical specialists did take organs from the corpses of Israeli soldiers, Israeli citizens, foreign workers and Palestinians, sometimes without permission from families, and that the institute had stopped that practice.
The Anti-Defamation League has described accusations that Israel is organ harvesting as a “conspiracy theory” that “plays on the blood libel trope which dates to the Middle Ages and alleges thatJews use the blood of Christian children to bake their Passover bread.”
“In the current Israeli-Palestinian context, organs are substituted for blood, and in some cases, activists are alleging that Israel purposefully kills Palestinians to harvest their organs,” the ADL said.
