Health workers transport the bodies of Palestinians handed over by Israel to Al-Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis, Gaza, on November 3, 2025. While accusations of organ theft against Israel have been around for decades, the allegations have resurfaced with the recent handover of bodies. These observations coincide with reports from the head of the Gaza Government Media Office, Ismail al-Thawabta, who accused Israeli forces of extracting organs from deceased Palestinians and demanded an immediate international investigation. For religious reasons as well, organ donation rates in Israeli-occupied territories are very low. Even a CNN investigation in 2008 identified Israel as one of the world's largest centers for the illegal trade in human organs. Image from 2023, when in Gaza, the delivery of at least 80 mutilated bodies was reported, which included the removal of organs. While approximately 30% of the population in Western countries carry organ donor cards, the figure in Israel is around 14%, a disparity that, according to activists, has fueled the unethical procurement of organs from Palestinians. Among the first emblematic cases is that of the 19-year-old Palestinian Bilal Ahmed Ghanem, killed by Israeli soldiers in 1992. Ghassan Abu Sittah, a British-Palestinian surgeon, who stated on Sunday that he had seen 'images of the bodies that the Palestinian Ministry of Health received from the Israeli army', which clearly showed 'lungs, heart, kidneys and liver surgically removed, professionally, using sharp bone saws, without causing any damage to the surrounding tissues'. Since the last century, Israel has had one of the lowest organ donation rates but at the same time a major organ bank, a fact that reinforces the various complaints at different times this century and others that preceded them, such as the case of Bilal Ahmed Ghanem in 1992. As early as the year 2000, in an interview, the former head of the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute, Yehuda Hiss, had exposed the illegal extraction of organs from Israeli and Palestinian citizens. There are also precedents of complaints in which Israel admitted to having extracted corneas, tissues, and other organs decades ago. The Zionist response was that this had indeed happened but that it had not been implemented for a decade. Even from this medium, two years ago, complaints were spread about organ theft by the State of Israel. In her book 'Over Their Dead Bodies', the Israeli doctor Meira Weiss detailed the systematic removal of organs from deceased Palestinians between 1996 and 2002 for use in medical research at Israeli universities and for transplants. Bilal was shot and then abducted by the Israeli regime and returned dead five days later with an incision that ran from his abdomen to his chin. 'Our children are used as involuntary organ donors', his family denounced at the time. The focus of that controversy sparked by that interview and complaints in the following years for the illegal extraction of organs was the Israeli forensic institute in Tel Aviv. The interview with Hiss, which had been conducted by the Berkeley University anthropologist, Nancy Sheper-Hughes, became public in 2009 after the publication of a Swedish medium that accused the State of Israel of organ theft. Abu Sittah specified that the photographs were taken on October 17, shortly after the Zionist regime handed over 120 bodies to the Palestinian Ministry of Health. This practice had also been denounced in 2023. One of them was by the Dr.
