The controversy triggered by a Swedish newspaper report about Israel’s harvesting of Palestinian organs has salted the wounds of many Palestinian families haunted by the memories of loved ones who suffered the same fate.
“They claimed they came to arrest him, but in truth they came to murder him, which they did,” Walid Masalmeh, a resident of the small West Bank town of Dura, 10 kilometer west of Al-Khalil (Hebron), said about his relative Bassam.
In 1995, Bassam was killed by the Israeli army at the village of Beit Awwa, located near the former armistice line between the West Bank and what is now Israel.
“But 24 hours later they returned the body with a huge scar running from the chin to the lower abdomen,” Walid remembers.
“They took all the vital organs, including the heart, kidneys, Liver. Then they stuffed the empty cavities with garbage before sewing him up.”
Several other Palestinians gave a similar narrative, recounting how they received the bodies of their murdered relatives, mostly men in their early twenties, with vital organs taken away by the Israeli authorities.
Israeli occupation authorities don’t deny that the bodies of victims were returned to their respective families minus the internal organs, but claim that the organs were disposed of as part of routine autopsy operations.
“I am not a medical doctor, but I do know that an autopsy is performed to establish the cause of death,” says Walid.
“In Bassam’s case, and hundreds of similar cases, the cause of death is known too well since the victims were killed by the Israeli occupation army.”
The Swedish mass circulation Aftonbladet published last month a report accusing Israeli troops of killing Palestinians and then harvesting their organs.
Israeli officials have dismissed the report as anti-Semitic and have been piling up pressures on the Swedish government to condemn it.
Stockholm has so far remained steadfast, insisting it was in no position to interfere with its free media.
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