“Organs looted from our sons”

Organ Gangs Force Poor to Sell Kidneys for Desperate Israelis

‘Exploit Shortages’ 

“There have been successes fighting organ trafficking around the world,” Delmonico says.  
“But organ trafficking continues to flourish because criminals exploit shortages of organ donors.”

Bloomberg Markets reported in June that U.S. citizens and others from the Americas suffering from kidney failure were going to Nicaragua and Peru to buy organs in a shadowy trade that injured and killed donors and recipients. 

That U.S.-Latin American connection is dwarfed by a network of organ-trafficking organizations whose reach extends from former Soviet Republics such as Azerbaijan, Belarus and Moldova to Brazil, the Philippines, South Africa and beyond, a Bloomberg Markets investigation shows.

Many of the black-market kidneys harvested by these gangs are destined for people who live in Israel.

Not Enough Donors 

With a generally well-educated population of 7.4 million and a modern medical system, Israel has an acute shortage of organs, in part because of religious beliefs. Just 12 percent of Israelis are registered donors, meaning they have consented to let their organs be used for transplants after they die, according to the Israeli National Transplant Center.

That compares with 40 percent of Americans. About 730 Israelis are currently waiting for a transplant, which is 13 times more than the number of such surgeries performed legally in Israel in 2010, according to the center. 

Delmonico, a professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School, has spent the past six years lobbying governments and doctors around the world to combat organ trafficking. ...

The dearth of available organs in Israel has spawned a new class of criminals, mainly immigrants from the former Soviet Union, says Jerusalem Police Superintendent Gilad Bahat.

Investigators on five continents say they have uncovered intertwining criminal rings run by Israelis and eastern Europeans that move people across borders -- sometimes against their will -- to sell a kidney.

“The criminal here is the middleman who profits from the sick and the poor,” says Bahat, who investigated an organ- trafficking ring in Jerusalem. “It touches my heart that people will sell part of their body because they need money to live.”

‘Obscene Profit’

Criminals see an opportunity to make big money in the organ trade, where they can sell a kidney for 15 to 20 times what they pay, police throughout Europe say.

“They recognize the obscene profit that can be made in the expanding black market in body parts,”
says Jonathan Ratel, a Pristina, Kosovo-based prosecutor who has been investigating organ trafficking over the past two years. “It keeps happening because there is so much money in this.” 

Traffickers typically pay $10,000 to a seller for a kidney and collect $150,000 when selling it to a patient.

Traffickers prey on the most-vulnerable people. Moldova, the poorest country in Europe, is one of their prime hunting grounds.

Dorin Razlog, a shepherd with an eighth-grade education who lives in Ghincauti, says recruiters for a trafficking ring told him cash for a kidney would lift him out of poverty. After doctors in Istanbul cut out the organ in August 2002, they paid him $7,000 -- $3,000 less than they’d offered. Of that, $2,500 was in counterfeit bills, he says. 

 

Prosecutors in nine countries have been conducting criminal probes of organ trafficking involving Israeli patients since 2003. The largest case dates to that year, when the Brazilian Federal Police noticed people from two slums of Recife, a coastal city 2,110 kilometers (1,311 miles) from Sao Paulo, flying to Durban, South Africa.

They returned home in so much pain from incisions across their abdomens that they needed assistance to get off the plane, says Karla Gomes de Matos Maia, the investigator who led the probe.

‘Suspect Organ Trafficking’

“Here you had people who didn’t fit the profile of tourists going to a strange destination and coming back after having major surgery,” Maia says. “We began to suspect organ trafficking.”

The Brazilian case is still wending its way through international courts. In November 2010 in Durban, Netcare Ltd. (NTC) -- South Africa’s largest hospital company -- pleaded guilty to violating the Human Tissue Act, which prohibits buying and selling organs.

Netcare paid 7.8 million rand ($848,464) in fines and penalties. It admitted to allowing 92 transplants in which donors from Brazil, Israel and Romania sold kidneys to Israeli patients. Four doctors are awaiting trial on trafficking charges.

* * * * * * * *

Palestinians accuse the Israeli army of selling the organs of its victims

Donald Boström

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.

Doctor 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.

August, 17, 2009  

"I am what you can call a 'matchmaker'”, said Levy Izhak Rosenbaum from Brooklyn, USA, in a secret recording by an FBI-agent whom he believed to be a client. Ten days later, at the end of July this year, Rosenbaum was arrested in connection with a massive corruption ring uncovered in New Jersey: rabbis, congressmen and entrusted officials had for years been busy with money laundering and the illegal organ trade, which now ended up like a Sopranos episode.  Rosenbaum’s matchmaking had nothing to do with romance and everything to do with buying and selling, on the black market,  kidneys from Israel. According to his own statements, he buys organs from poor people in Israel for $10,000 and sells them back to desperate patients in the US for $160,000. ...  

Levy Izhak Rosenbaum is driven away by FBI agents.

Rosenbaum was allegedly a middleman in the illegal organ trade.

 Photo: AP

The accusations have shaken the American transplant industry. Should this be true,  it would be the first time organ trafficking has been documented in the US, according to experts cited by the newspaper New Jersey Real-Time News.

On the question of how many organs were sold, Rosenbaum says: "Quite a lot." And he boasts, "I have never failed." His business was carried out over a very long period of time.

Francis Delmonici, a professor in transplant surgery at Harvard, and member of the Board at the National Kidney Foundation’s Board of Directors, is quoted in the same newspaper, saying that the same type of organ trafficking which takes place in Israel, also takes place in other parts of the world. Delmonici says that of the 63,000 kidney transplants in the world, approximately 10% are illegal.

Hot countries for that type of illegal trade are Pakistan, the Philippines and China, where it is believed that organs are taken from executed prisoners. But strong suspicion also exists in Palestine, where people believe that their young men, captured as prisoners, have, as in China and Pakistan, been taken as organ donors and that they were later executed. This is a very serious allegation that raises so many questions, that the ICJ, International Court of Justice, should absolutely open an investigation over the possibility of war crimes perpetrated by Israel.

Israel has time and again been at the forefront of criticism when it comes to its unethical way of handling organs and transplants. Countries like France have suspended their  cooperation on organs with Israel since the beginning of the 90s, and the Jerusalem Post wrote: 

 ”Other countries in Europe are expected to follow France’s example shortly”.

Half of the new kidneys that Israelis have received since the beginning of the year 2000 have been illegally bought from Turkey, Eastern Europe or South America. The Israeli health-care authorities have a complete knowledge of the activity, but do nothing to stop it. In 2003, at a conference, it was revealed that Israel is the only western country where doctors do not condemn the illegal trade of organs or take any legal measures against doctors who have conducted such illegal operations. To the contrary, according to Dagens Nyheter (December 5, 2003), the Chief Doctors of the largest hospitals are involved in the majority of illegal transplant cases, .

Ehud Olmert

In an attempt to fill the need for organs in the country, Israel’s then health minister, Ehud Olmert, ordered a large campaign in the summer of 1992, to get the Israeli population to come forward as organ donors. One half million pamphlets were distributed to local newspapers where citizens were encouraged to write to donate their organs after their death. Ehud Olmert was the first to write his name down.

Only a couple of weeks later, the Jerusalem Post wrote that the campaign had been very successful. Not less than 35 000 persons had enrolled, when usually it’s about 500 a month. In the same article, the journalist Judy Siegel, wrote that the gap between offer and demand was still extensive. 500 persons were queuing for a kidney transplant, but only 124 could receive surgery.

 Out of 45 persons in need of a new liver, only three had a chance to get an operation in Israel.

At the same time when that campaign was going on, 

young Palestinians were disappearing and were being returned at night to their villages, 

five days later, dead and ripped up.

The story of the ripped up bodies terrified the populations in Gaza and the West Bank. There was a story of a dramatic increase of young men’s disappearance, with the subsequent nightly funerals of autopsied young men.

Donald Boström

I was in the area working on a book when I was contacted several times by UN staff members who were worried about the situation. Those who contacted me said that the theft of organs indeed took place, but that there was nothing they could do. On assignment for a TV company, I traveled around and spoke with a great number of Palestinian families in the West Bank and Gaza, who declared that their sons had been robbed of their organs before they were killed. One of the examples I came across on that gruesome journey was the young stone thrower Bilal Achmed Ghanan.

It was close to midnight when the sound of the engines of cars coming from the Israeli military column was heard in the outskirts of the small village called Imatin on the northern part of the West Bank. The two thousand villagers were awake and stood silently, shadowed in the dark. Some were posted on the roofs, others behind their curtains, houses or trees that could give them protection in the darkness under the curfew but could give them a good view over what would become the cemetery for the village’s first martyr. The military had cut off all electrical power around the village and the area was restricted to the military — not a single cat could move outside without risking its life. The darkness’ numbing silence was only broken by quiet sobbing, and I don’t remember if we were shivering because of the cold or because of the suspense. Five days earlier, on May 13th, 1992, an Israeli special force unit had waited in an ambush at the village’s carpentry shop. The person the special forces were looking for was the young 19-year old Bilal Achmed Ghanan, whom they had orders to neutralize, as he was one those active young Palestinians who rendered the Israeli occupation forces’ lives miserable by throwing stones.

Bilal Ghanan was one of the leading stone throwers and had been on the wanted list for a couple of years. This meant that he and other wanted stone throwing boys lived under the bare sky up in the Nablus Mountains. To be captured implied death and all the stories about previous torture scenes did not improve things. So they remained in the mountains. But for one reason or another, Bilal came down from the mountains one day and wandered unprotected into the village, passing the carpenter’s house on that unlucky day in mid-May. Why he did come down on that particular day, not even Talal, his older brother, could say. Perhaps there was a lack of food and they were short of supplies.

Everything happened according to plans for the Israeli Special Forces unit. They stubbed out their cigarettes, took away the cans of Coca Cola and took aim calmly and quietly through the broken window. When Bilal was near enough, they only had to squeeze the trigger. He got shot the first time in the chest. According to the villagers who witnessed the incident, he was also shot after that, once in each leg. After which, two soldiers ran out from the carpentry shop and shot him twice in the stomach. Finally, they took Bilal by the feet and dragged him down the 20 steps of stone of the carpentry. The villagers also say that afterwards, people from the UN and the Red Crescent who happened to be in the area and had heard the shots came to take care of the wounded.

The discussion over who would take care of the victim ended when the Israeli forces took charge of the badly hurt Bilal, loaded him into a jeep and drove away to the village’s outskirts. There waited a military helicopter that took Bilal away to an unknown destination.

Five days later, he was back in the darkness, dead and wrapped up in green hospital cloths. When the military column, that had come to get Bilal from the autopsy center Abu Kabir outside Tel Aviv, stopped by the place where Bilal would be placed to rest, someone recognized the Israeli military leader by the name of Captain Yahya. In the dark, a person whispered “The worst of them all” in my ear. After Captain Yahya’s men had unloaded the body and exchanged the green cloth for a light colored cotton cloth, a few male relatives were picked up to complete the job by digging earth and mixing cement.

Together with the sharp sound of the spades, some laughs were heard on the part of the soldiers who waited to go home as they exchanged jokes with each other. When Bilal was lowered down to the ground, his chest was exposed and it became suddenly clear to those who were present what type of abuse he had been subjected to. Bilal was by no means the first person who was buried with a stitched up body from the stomach to the neck, but speculation about the purpose jumpstarted.

Bilal Achmed Ghanan, 19 years old, was shot and taken by Israeli soldiers. 

His body was later returned stitched up again from belly to neck. Photo: Donald Boström 

The victimized Palestinian families on the West Bank and Gaza were convinced of what had happened to their sons. "Our sons are used as unwilling organ donors," said the relatives of Khaled from Nablus to me. The same went with Raed from Jenin and the cousins to Machmod and Nafes from Gaza, who all disappeared over a number of days and had returned at night, dead and autopsied.

Bilal Achmed Ghanem was one of the 133 Palestinians who were killed in various ways that year. According to Palestinian statistics, the reasons of death were as follows:   shot in the street, explosion, battery, tear gas, intentionally run over by a car, hanged in prison, shot at school, killed in the house, etc. Of those 133 assassinated persons of all ages from four months to 88 years old, 69 were autopsied, which is to say half of the dead. The routine autopsies carried out on dead Palestinians, as the army spokesman said, do not match  the reality in the occupied areas. The questions remain.

We know that there is a great need for organs in Israel. And we know that there is a widespread illegal organ trade under way, that it has been going on for a long time, that it takes place with the blessing of the authorities, and that high-level doctors in the largest hospitals and officials at different levels also take part in it. And we know that Palestinian young men disappeared, that they were returned five days later under mysterious circumstances at night, ripped up and stitched back.

* * * * * * * *

 

Israeli Organ Harvesting

by ALISON WEIR

In the article, “Our sons plundered for their organs,” veteran journalist Donald Bostrom writes that Palestinians “harbor strong suspicions against Israel for seizing young men and having them serve as the country’s organ reserve – a very serious accusation, with enough question marks to motivate the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to start an investigation about possible war crimes.”

An army of Israeli officials and apologists immediately went into high gear, calling both Bostrom and the newspaper’s editors “anti-Semitic.” The Israeli foreign minister was reportedly “aghast” and termed it “a demonizing piece of blood libel.” An Israeli official called it “hate porn.”

The fact is, however, that substantiated evidence of public and private organ trafficking and theft, and allegations of worse, have been widely reported for many years. Given such context, the Swedish charges become far more plausible than might otherwise be the case and suggest that an investigation could well turn up significant information.

Below are a few examples of previous reports on this topic.

Israel’s first heart transplant

Israel’s very first, historic heart transplant used a heart removed from a living patient without consent or consulting his family.

In December 1968 a man named Avraham Sadegat (the New York Times seems to give his name as A Savgat) (2) died two days after a stroke, even though his family had been told he was “doing well.”

After initially refusing to release his body, the Israeli hospital where he was being treated finally turned the man’s body over to his family. They discovered that his upper body was wrapped in bandages; an odd situation, they felt, for someone who had suffered a stroke.

When they removed the bandages, they discovered that the chest cavity was stuffed with bandages, and the heart was missing.

During this time, the headline-making Israeli heart transplant had occurred. After their initial shock, the man’s wife and brother began to put the two events together and demanded answers.

The hospital at first denied that Sadegat’s heart had been used in the headline-making transplant, but the family raised a media storm and eventually applied to three cabinet ministers. Finally, weeks later and after the family had signed a document promising not to sue, the hospital admitted that Sadagat’s heart had been used.

The hospital explained that it had abided by Israeli law, which allowed organs to be harvested without the family’s consent.  (3) (The United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime includes the extraction of organs in its definition of human exploitation.)

Indications that the removal of Sadagat’s heart was the actual cause of death went unaddressed. 

Mysterious Scottish death

In 1998 a Scot named Alisdair Sinclair died under questionable circumstances while in Israeli custody at Ben Gurion airport.

His family was informed of the death and, according to a report in J Weekly, “…told they had three weeks to come up with about $4,900 to fly Sinclair’s corpse home. [Alisdair’s brother] says the Israelis seemed to be pushing a different option: burying Sinclair in a Christian cemetery in Israel, at a cost of about $1,300.”

The family scraped up the money, brought the body home, and had an autopsy performed at the University of Glasgow.

It turned out that Alisdair’s heart and a tiny throat bone were missing. 

At this point the British Embassy filed a complaint with Israel.

The J report states:

 “A heart said to be Sinclair’s was subsequently repatriated to Britain, free of charge. James wanted the [Israeli] Forensic Institute to pay for a DNA test to confirm that this heart was indeed their brother’s, but the Institute’s director, Professor Jehuda Hiss refused, citing the prohibitive cost, estimated by some sources at $1,500.” 

Doctor Jehuda Hiss

Despite repeated requests from the British Embassy for the Israeli pathologist’s and police reports, Israeli officials refused to release either.

* * * * * *

China’s illegal organ harvesting

Transplant consent in theory only

Rep. Christopher H. Smith

In the mid-1990s, I began holding hearings on the practice of organ harvesting of prisoners in China, and unfortunately, the controversial practice has not gone away. At a hearing for which I was co-chairman last week, two subcommittees of the House Foreign Affairs Committee heard that even though few Chinese voluntarily donate organs, China stands next behind the United States in the yearly number of organ transplants. With 600 transplant centers, it has become a destination for “transplant tourism.” Each transplant of a heart or liver can provide more than $100,000 in revenue.

 What adjectives can we use to describe the prospect that Chinese doctors and hospitals are engaged in large-scale harvesting of human organs for profit? The ordinary words such as “disturbing,” “appalling” or even “shocking” are inadequate.

So far, I have referred to ordinary transplants. But there’s a graver prospect. It is that Chinese military doctors may be engaged in organ harvesting from prisoners and labor-camp detainees, especially prisoners of conscience.

 China’s vice minister of health acknowledged in 2005 that almost all organs come from executed prisoners, but the number of executions in China is a “state secret.” In China, there are no firm statistics, no open waiting lists and no transparency in the granting of “consent.” From the few times Chinese doctors or health officials have discussed China’s transplant system at international meetings, the figures don’t add up. The best available outside estimates indicate that the number of transplants apparently exceeds the number of criminal executions. So then, what is the source of the additional organs?

 ….

The most gruesome testimony came from Chinese doctors who told Mr. Gutmann that some of the organs for transplant came from still-living victims.

Yes, these reports of horror sanctioned by a modern state beg for evidence, and proof is in short supply. But this possibility pushes us into a horrific beyond, a beyond that challenges our language, making “barbaric” too calm a word, too leached of horror.

http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/authors/SwedishTrans.html
http://www.counterpunch.org/2009/08/28/israeli-organ-harvesting/
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-01/organ-gangs-force-poor-to-sell-kidneys-for-desperate-israelis.html
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/sep/18/chinas-illegal-organ-harvesting/#ixzz2wNRsNUfR