New allegations about Israeli organ harvesting feature Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu having sought legal approval in the 1990s to take organs from Palestinians murdered by the IDF for transplantation into the bodies of Jews that needed them.
The claim cites documented admissions concerning the removal of organs without consent at Israel’s state forensic institute. Those earlier revelations detailed how corneas, skin, heart valves and bones were taken during autopsies without authorisation — a practice that Israeli officials later acknowledged to be true.
The latest report claims that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu personally sought approval for policies all the way back in the 1990s involving the use of the bodies of murdered Palestinians for ‘medical purposes’.
‘Taking organs from dead terrorists for transplantation into Israeli Jews? I’ll check if the idea is legally feasible,’ Netanyahu is reported to have said according to a official Israeli government document shared on X.
The Israeli prime minister did not reject the proposal — he rolled it (or promised to roll it) over to ‘legal experts’.
Netanyahu was reported to have expressed interest in the idea, writing that he would examine whether it was ‘applicable under Israeli law.’
Many are now questioning whether this marked the beginning of the established policy of organ harvesting by the Jewish state.
The renewed allegations draw on confirmed admissions by Israeli officials that, during the 1990s, organs were removed at Israel’s main state forensic facility, the L Greenberg National Institute of Forensic Medicine — commonly known as the Abu Kabir forensic institute — in Tel Aviv.
The institute, which conducts autopsies and provides forensic services for the Israeli state, was found to have removed organs from the bodies of murdered Palestinians without their families’ consent.
Israeli authorities later acknowledged that corneas, skin, heart valves, and bones had been taken during autopsies without authorisation, describing the practice as having occurred ‘for years’.
Although these admissions relate to unauthorised organ ‘retention’ rather than a declared harvesting policy, they continue to fuel speculation about the broader treatment of the bodies of murdered Palestinians.
Human rights organisations estimate that Israel continues to hold the bodies of hundreds of Palestinians. This policy, combined with recent reports of unidentified human remains being returned to Gaza in sealed bags following months of military operations, has intensified suspicion.
Mary Turfah, a writer and surgical resident trained in anthropology at Yale and Middle Eastern South Asian and African Studies at Columbia, writing recently in The Baffler, examined what she described as the political management of Palestinian bodies.
Turfah argues that the treatment of Palestinian bodies is not incidental but structural. She describes how Israel has retained bodies, buried them in numbered graves and delayed their return to families, framing these practices as part of a wider system of control. The power exercised over Palestinians, she suggests, does not end with death. Instead, the state continues to determine when and how bodies are released, identified, or buried.
On the issue of organ removal specifically, Turfah situates it within a wider pattern of state control. She refers to past admissions that organs were taken without family consent and treats that episode as part of a longer history in which Palestinian bodies are treated as ‘property of the state’ even after death.