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Old August 22nd, 2009 #5
Alex Linder
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This is a cleaned up version of a Google translation of the controversial Aftonbladet article "Våra söner plundras på sina organ" by Donald Boström, http://www.aftonbladet.se/kultur/article5652583.ab
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"Our sons are plundered for their organs'
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[Photo captions]
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Young Palestinian men throwing stones and glass bottles against Israeli soldiers in the northern West Bank. In this area Bilal Achmed Ghanan was shot and cut open in hospital. "Our sons are used as organ supplies," say the Palestinians.
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Photo: Donald Boström
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Bilal Achmed Ghanan, 19, was shot and taken away by Israeli soldiers. The body was returned sewn back together from the stomach to the neck.
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Photo: Donald Boström
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Levy Izhak Rosenbaum are removed by FBI agents. Rosenbaum should have acted as a middleman in the illegal organ trade.
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Photo: AP
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Palestinians accuse the Israeli army of stealing body parts from its victims.
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Here, Donald Boström tells of the international transplant scandal - and how he himself became a witness to the assault on a 19-year-old boy.
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'I am what you might call a "match maker,"' said Levy Izhak Rosenbaum from Brooklyn, USA, in a secret recording with an FBI agent he thought was a customer. Ten days later, at the end of July this year Rosenbaum was arrested in connection with a large tangle of corruption uncovered in New Jersey: rabbis, elected and trusted officials had for years engaged in money laundering and illegal organ trading, which was now rolling up like a Soprano network. Rosenbaums matchmaking was not about romance but about buying and selling kidneys from Israel on the black market. According to his own statement, he buys bodies from the needy people in Israel for 10,000 dollars and sell them to desperate patients in the U.S. for 160,000 dollars. The legal waiting time for kidneys is an average of nine years.
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The accusations have shaken the American transplant industry. If this is true, it is the first time organ trafficking documented in the U.S., said experts in the New Jersey Real-Time News.
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Asked how many bodies he has sold Rosenbaum responds: 'Quite a lot. Many. And I have never failed', he brags on. His business has been going on for a very long time.
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Francis Delmonici, Harvard Professor of Transplantation Surgery, and a board member of the National Kidney Foundation's Board of Directors, said in the same newspaper that similar organ trafficking in Israel is also under way elsewhere in the world. Roughly 10 percent of the 63,000 kidney transplants in the world are made illegally, says Delmonici.
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Hot countries for this illegal activity are Pakistan, the Philippines and China, where it is believed that organs taken from executed prisoners. But the Palestinians strongly suspect that their young men have been caught, and as in China and Pakistan involuntary acted as spare part reserves before they were killed. A very serious suspicion that has enough questions that the ICJ, International Court of Justice, should definitely open an investigation into whether it is a matter of Israeli war crimes.
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Israel has repeatedly been in hot water for their unethical way of dealing with organs and transplantation. Countries including France cut off the body cooperation with Israel as early as the nineties, and the Jerusalem Post wrote "other countries in Europe are expected to follow France's example soon."
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Half of the new kidneys that Israelis had implanted since the early 2000's have been purchased illegally from Turkey, Eastern Europe or Latin America. Israeli health authorities have full knowledge of the business, but do nothing to stop it. In 2003 it was revealed at a conference that Israel is the only Western country whose medical profession does not condemn the illegal organ trade or take any legal action against the doctors involved in the criminal trade. On the contrary, senior physicians at the major hospitals are involved in most illegal transplantations, according to Dagens Nyheter (December 5, 2003).
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In an attempt to overcome organ shortage in the country Israel's then health minister, Ehud Olmert, ran a major campaign in summer 1992 to get the Israeli population to volunteer as organ donors. Half a million pamphlets were distributed in local newspapers where citizens were invited to write in to donate their organs after their death. Ehud Olmert was the first to sign up.
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Already a couple of weeks after the Jerusalem Post wrote that the campaign had given a successful outcome. No less is 35 000 people had signed up, usually it is 500 a month. In the same article the journalist Judy Siegel wrote that the gap between supply and demand was still high. The queue for kidney transplants was 500 people, but only 124 people could undergo surgery. Of the 45 persons in need of a new liver, only three people had the opportunity to undergo surgery in Israel.
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During this this organ drive,young Palestinian men disappeared and came back at night to their villages five days later, dead and cut open.
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Talk about the mutilated bodies terrified the population in the West Bank and Gaza. There was talk of a dramatic increase in young men who disappeared with subsequent nocturnal funerals of autopsy young men.
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I was in the area working on a book when I was contacted several times by UN staff who were concerned about the development. Those who contacted me felt that body theft actually took place, but that they were unable to act. On behalf of a television company, I then went around and spoke to a large number of Palestinian families in the West Bank and Gaza, who said that their sons had been robbed of organs before they were killed. One of the examples I saw of this eerie trip was the young stone thrower Bilal Achmed Ghanan.
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The clock was approaching midnight when the engine sounds from the Israeli military column was heard on the outskirts of the village Imatin in the northern West Bank. The village's two thousand inhabitants remained awake and stood as silent shadows in the dark. Some were on rooftops, others were behind their curtains, houses or trees, which gave protection in the dark during the curfew but still offered a clear view of what would become a graveyard for the village's first martyr. The military had broken all the electricity around the village and the area was closed-off military area - not a cat could move outdoors without risking its life. The deafening silence of the dark was broken only by quiet sob and I can not remember if it was the cold or excitement that made us shiver. Five days earlier, on May 13, 1992, an Israeli special force had set up an ambush in the village wood shop. Their target was the 19-year-old Bilal Achmed Ghanan, one of the active Palestinian stone-throwing youths who made life difficult for the Israeli occupying power.
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Bilal Ghanan was one of the leading stone throwers, and the Israelis had been looking for him for a couple of years. This meant that hem along with other wanted stone throwing kids, lived under the sky up in the Nablus hills. To be captured meant death, and the stories of torture did not improve matters. Thus they stayed in the hills. But for some reason, Bilal came down from the mountains one day and wandered unprotected through the village past the carpenter house this unfortunate day in mid-May. Why he came down just this day not even Talal, his older brother, could answer; perhaps they were out of food and needed to stock up.
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Everything went according to plan for the Israeli special forces. They stamped out their cigarettes, put aside their Coca-Cola cans and aimed calmly through the broken window. When Bilal was sufficiently close, they had only to pull the trigger. The first shot hit his chest. According to villagers who witnessed the incident, he was then shot in each leg. Then two soldiers ran from the wood shop and shot him once again in the stomach. Finally, they took Bilal by the feet and dragged him up the 20 steps of the wood shop's stone staircase. Villagers say that people from both the UN and Red Crescent who were nearby and heard the shots came to take care of the injured. The argument about who would take care of the victim ended with Israeli force loading the severely injured Bilal in a jeep and driving off to the village's outskirts. There they met a waiting military helicopter which carried Bilal off to an unknown destination.
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Five days later he came back in the dark, dead and wrapped in green hospital fabrics. When the military column which had fetched Bilal from the Abu Kabir autopsy center outside Tel Aviv stop at his place of final rest, someone recognised the Israeli military leader as Captain Yahya. "The most difficult of them all", the person whispered in the darkness in my ear. When Captain Yahya's men loaded the body and exchanged the green fabric for a light cotton fabric, a few male relatives were chosen to do the job - to dig soil and mix cement.
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Together with the sharp sounds of shovels were heard occasional laughter from the soldiers, who were joking to each other while waiting to return. When Bilal was lowered into the grave, his chest was uncovered and the abuse he suffered suddenly became clear to the few present. Bilal was far from the first to be buried with a cut from the abdomen up to the chin and speculation about the intention had been rampant.
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The affected Palestinian families in the West Bank and Gaza were sure what had happened to their sons. 'Our sons are used as forced organ donors', relatives of Khaled from Nablus told me, as did the mother of Raed from Jenin and uncles to Machmod and Nafes from Gaza, all of whom were missing a number of days and come back at night, dead and dissected.
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Why did they keep the bodies for up to five days before we can bury them? What happened to the bodies in the meantime? And why the autopsy when the cause of death is obvious, and in all cases against our will? And why are the bodies brought back at night? And why with a military escort? And why are areas closed off for the funeral? And why is the electricity cut off? Nafe's uncle's questions were many and outraged.
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The families of the killed Palestinian men no longer had any question about it.
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The spokesman for the Israeli army, on the other hand, said allegations of organ theft were fabrications by the Palestinians. All Palestinians who were killed were routinely subject to autopsy, he said.
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Bilal Achmed Ghanem was one of 133 Palestinians killed in various ways that year. According to Palestinian statistics, the causes of death were: street shootings, explosions, beatings, tear gas, deliberately run over, hanged in prison, shot in schools, killed at home, etc. Of the 133 killed persons aged four months to 88 years, 69 had autopsies, i.e. only half of the dead. The routine autopsy of killed Palestinians the army spokesman mentioned is not the reality in the Occupied Territories. Questions remain.
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We know that the need for organs in Israel is large, that an extensive illegal organ is trade ongoing, that there has been a long time, that it is done with the blessing of the authorities, that senior doctors at the major hospitals are involved, as well as officials at various levels. And we know that the Palestinian young men disappeared, they were brought back five days later in secrecy at night, cut open and sewn together.
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It is time to shed light on this macabre activity on what is going on and what has been happening in the Israeli occupied territories since the intifada started.
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Donald Boström
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Donald Boström is a journalist, photographer and author of, among other things, the book Inshallah (Ordfront förlag 2003).

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