Netanyahu’s office announces the arrival of the second batch of released prisoners to Israel

While government figures in Gaza estimate that there are about 7,000 missing persons, dozens of whom are detained by Israel, human rights bodies expressed, today, Saturday, their fears about suspicions of “theft of organs” from them.

The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor called for the formation of an independent international investigation committee into the Israeli army’s detention of the bodies of those killed from the Shifa Medical Complex in Gaza and the Indonesian Hospital in the northern Gaza Strip.

He also pointed out other cases of detaining bodies from the vicinity of the displacement corridor to the center and south of the sector that he allocated on the main Salah al-Din road.

Euro-Med reported that the Israeli army also exhumed a mass grave that had been established more than ten days ago in one of the courtyards of the Shifa Medical Complex, and extracted the bodies of the dead from it and detained them.

He pointed out that while dozens of bodies were released by handing them over to the International Committee of the Red Cross, which in turn transported them to the southern Gaza Strip to complete the burial process, the Israeli army is still detaining the bodies of dozens of other dead, according to what the German News Agency reported.

The Euro-Mediterranean Observatory raised suspicions of the theft of organs from the bodies of dead people, including observations made by doctors in Gaza who conducted a quick examination of some of the bodies after their release, and noted the theft of organs such as the cornea of ​​the eye and the cochlea, and other vital organs such as the liver, kidneys, and heart.

Doctors working in several hospitals told the Euro-Med team that the forensic medical examination is not sufficient to prove or deny the theft of organs, especially in light of the presence of previous surgical interventions on several bodies.

They stated that it was impossible for them to conduct an accurate analytical examination of the bodies of the dead that were being held by the Israeli army under intense air and artillery attacks, and the continuing influx of wounded, but they detected several signs of possible organ theft.

The Euro-Mediterranean Observatory said that Israel has a long history of detaining the bodies of dead Palestinians. It holds the bodies of at least 145 Palestinians in special refrigerators, in addition to about 255 in the Numbers Cemetery and 75 missing persons, whose bodies it refuses to acknowledge.

He pointed out that Israel relies on detaining the bodies of dead Palestinians by burying them in what it calls “enemy combatant graves,” which are secret mass graves located in specific areas, such as closed military zones, in which burials take place anonymously, with numbers engraved on metal plates attached to the bodies or remains.

Euro-Med reported that it had previously been observed that the Israeli authorities deliberately released the bodies of dead Palestinians to their relatives in the West Bank after a period of detention, while they were frozen at a temperature that could reach minus forty, with the stipulation that the bodies not be dissected, which may hide the theft of some organs.

He highlighted that Israel has resorted, in recent years, to legalizing the matter, allowing it to formulate justifications for detaining the bodies of dead Palestinians and stealing their organs, including a decision of the Supreme Court in Israel issued in 2019, which allows the military ruler to detain the bodies and bury them temporarily in what is known as the number cemeteries.

At the end of 2021, the Israeli Knesset (Parliament) enacted legal legislation authorizing the police and army to keep the remains of dead Palestinians.

In recent years, there have been reports of illegal exploitation of the bodies of dead Palestinians held by Israel, including stealing organs from them and using them in medical school laboratories at Israeli universities.

In her book (On Their Dead Bodies), Israeli doctor Meir Weiss revealed that organs were stolen from the bodies of dead Palestinians to be transplanted into the bodies of Jewish patients, and used in medical faculties at Israeli universities to conduct research on them.

But what is more dangerous than that is what was admitted by Yehuda Hess, the former director of the Abu Kabir Institute of Forensic Medicine in Israel, regarding the theft of human organs, tissues and skin from dead Palestinians in different periods of time, without the knowledge or consent of their families.

The Euro-Mediterranean Observatory confirmed that Israel, which is the only country that detains the bodies of the dead and practices this as a systematic policy, and is classified as the largest global center for the illegal trade in human organs, is content with justifying the policy of detaining dead bodies as “an attempt at security deterrence,” ignoring international charters and agreements that prohibit that.

He stressed the need for Israel to be bound by the rules of international law, which stipulate the necessity of respecting and protecting the bodies of the dead during armed conflicts, while the Fourth Geneva Convention stresses the need for parties to the conflict to take all possible measures to prevent the plundering of the dead and the mutilation of their bodies.

The Euro-Mediterranean Observatory also confirmed that refusing to hand over the bodies of the dead to their families to bury them with dignity and in accordance with their religious beliefs may amount to collective punishment prohibited in Article 50 of the Hague Regulations and Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.