Israel, Shylock Merchant of the Levant

 Elias Akleh

Shylock, a Jewish moneylender/usurer, is a main character in William Shakespeare’s 16th-century five-acts play “Merchant of Venice”. Antonio, a Venetian merchant, borrowed money from Shylock with a bond stating that if he defaults the loan on time Shylock is entitled to a pound of Antonio’s flesh. Antonio defaulted the loan because his trade ships were reported lost in the sea. Rejecting three times a higher sum of money in repayment Shylock insisted in a court on his legal right to Antonio’s pound of flesh. Disguised as a male lawyer, Antonio’s female friend, Portia, saved Antonio’s life by arguing that Shylock’s bond entitles him to Antonio’s one pound of flesh but not one drop of his blood.

Israel has surpassed Shylock’s butchering spirit. Starting with 1917 British government’s “Balfour Declaration” and for the last 108 years, the Jewish Zionist terrorist groups, the Hagana, the Irgun (ETZEL), the Stern and the LEHI, who later formed the Israeli terrorist army, have been butchering hundreds of thousands of Palestinians; men, women, children, and yes babies, in hundreds of gruesome massacres (All That Remains by Walid Khalidi). Israel’s genocide in the Gaza Strip, dropping hundreds of thousands of American made and supplied 2-tons-bombs (MK-84 bombs) leveling 90% of Gaza’s infrastructure to the ground, producing 60 million tonnes of rubble according to UN Development Programme (UNDP), murdering a median estimate of 112,069 Palestinian civilians (not the alleged 70 thousands), men, women, children, and newly-born babies, many of whose bodies were ribbed apart, mutilated, burned by fire, and buried under the rubble, and still daily murdering Palestinian civilians despite the fake ceasefire agreement, is just only one genocidal incident of the planned grand genocide (similar to the native American genocide) of the whole Arab nation in the Greater Israel scheme.

It was not enough for Jewish Israelis to display utter contempt of Palestinian life by destroying it with every unimaginable method, their depravity went so deep that they violate the bodies of those they murder by harvesting and using their body organs as a trade product. In fact, they created an industry and a lucrative international business of harvesting and trafficking of human body parts. Although the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention mandates respect for the dignity of dead civilians and explicitly prohibits the looting or mutilation of their bodies during wartime, Israelis, who grant themselves the right to ignore and to violate all international and humanitarian laws, also ignores and violates this convention.

This Israeli organ trafficking industry is encouraged and supported by Jewish Rabbis and by the Israeli government. Chabad Lubavitch leader Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh, referred to as the Malakh (the angel) taught that:

“If a Jew needs a liver, can you take the liver of an innocent non-Jew passing by to save him? The Torah would probably permit that … Jewish life has infinite value. There is something infinitely more holy and unique about Jewish life than non-Jewish life.” (The Jewish Week, April 26, 1996).

Such racist attitude is adopted by the majority of Jewish Israelis and is preached by many Rabbis and politicians not just by Chabad Lubavitch Rabbis.

Based on such religiously racist declaration, Israel National Skin Bank was officially founded in 1986 by the Israeli Defense Forces Medical Corps and the Ministry of Health and is located at the Hadassah University Hospital in Jerusalem. Although it was founded 40 years after the establishment of the Americn human skin bank, with its conservative estimate of at least 170 square meters of reserved human skin, this Israel Skin Bank is considered the world’s largest skin bank. One cannot but wonder where this world’s largest bank gets its skin from since Israel is a tiny country compared to the US, it has the lowest donor rate in the world – one in 10 adults – according to BBC, and the Jewish religious law prohibits organ donations and/or transplantations as a “desecration of the body.” Yet, it is OK to desecrate the bodies of non-Jews (goyims).

Abu Kabir Forensic Institute was founded in 1954 in Tel Aviv as part of the police criminal division. Its management was transferred many times to different ministries, universities, medical institutions, and finally in 2012 was transferred to the medical administration at the Ministry of Health. Abu Kabir is the only facility in Israel authorized to conduct autopsies. This institute has gone through many malpractice scandals concerning the theft and sale of body organs.

The business of the Israeli global organ trafficking started to unfold with the 2000 KidneyGate case exposed by Nancy Scheper-Hughes, a professor of anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley and founder of medical trafficking watchdog Organ Watch. Ilan Perry, an Israeli businessman with medical insurance background, had setup a global organ trafficking and transplant scheme with the partnership of Richard Friedlan, the Jewish chief operating officer of the Netcare Group in South Africa that lasted eleven years before being exposed.

In 2008 the case of the Medicus Clinic in Pristina, Kosovo, was also exposed. Israeli Moshe Harel was the main logistical organizer, travel planner, and financial agent between patients and donor victims. He partnered with Turkish surgeon Yusuf Sonmez, and with Jewish Israeli Boris Wolfman, known as one of the leaders of organ trafficking organizers in Israel. Wolfman was later arrested in Turkey in December 2015 while trying to take advantage of desperate Syrian refugees by selling their kidneys.

In October 2009 the Swedish AftonBladet published an investigative article titled “Our sons are plundered of their organs”. The author, Donald Bostrom, was told by Palestinians that they have strong suspicions that their young men, who had been murdered and their bodies were kidnapped by the Israeli soldiers, had their body organs stolen. Bostrom’s investigation in the matter exposed Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, a Jewish Israeli/American double citizen from Brooklyn, USA, as a “matchmaker” between “Israeli kidney donors” and American customers. Francis Delmonici, a professor of transplant surgery at Harvard and member of the National Kidney Foundation’s Board of Directors, informed Bostrom that similar organ-trafficking operations are carried out in other parts of the world as well, and that 5,000 – 6,000 illegal transplant operations per year are carried out.

Where do Jewish Israeli organ traffickers get organs from? On his website Donald Bostrom provided the shocking answer. He reported that killed Palestinians’ bodies were kidnapped by the Israeli army for months, then when they are returned to their families the army imposed strict process of immediate burial of the bodies usually in the evening without examining the bodies and with attendance of only immediate family members, all is done quickly and silently. After noticing surgical incisions on the skin of bodies family members had later exhumed the bodies for medical examination. It was found that all their internal organs had been removed. Unfortunately, these discoveries were totally ignored by health department, Western journalists and officials.

Bostrom interviewed Chen Kugel, an Israeli Colonel Lieutenant and pathologist, a brave whistleblower, who used to work in the Abu Kabir Institute. For more than a decade Kugel tried to stop the organ theft from within the system. He was faced with fierce opposition and eventually he was kicked out of the Institute, where he had witnessed these organ extractions/thefts for 15 years. Kugel explained:

“At the institute, everything possible was taken from the deceased without permission from Palestinians, Israelis, tourists, guest workers, and even our own soldiers.”

Kugel explained further that according to sources working at the Israeli Abu Kabir Forensic Institute in Tel Aviv, where these “irregularities” took place, illegal extensive organ extractions were conducted during a period of at least 24 years. Not only were the major organs like heart, liver, brain, kidneys, lungs extracted from the bodies, but also eyes, corneas, skin, glands, joints, tendons and long bones, and femur were also extracted. Some parts were used for transplantation, while other body parts and tissues were used for research or for medical students, depending on who the client was. To hide these unauthorized activities, eyelids were glued together, stomachs filled with toilet paper, and femur replaced with broom shafts. Skin was only taken from the back, where discovery is more difficult.

The fact is, however, that Israeli organ harvesting industry has tentacles that reach every part of the world. It has been documented for years that this lucrative business is operated with the direct participation of Israeli governmental funding, of high Israeli officials, of prominent Israeli physicians, and of Israeli ministries. The Israeli Ministry of Defense was directly involved in what is called Israel’s “illicit national program of transplant tourism”. In a lecture sponsored by New York’s PBS 13 Forum Nancy Scheper-Hughes testified at a US Congressional subcommittee hearing in 2001 that human rights groups in the West Bank had complained to her about Israeli pathologists stealing tissue and organs from the bodies of Palestinian martyrs. She explained that Israeli organ traffickers:

“… had and still have a pyramid system at work that’s awesome…they have brokers everywhere, bank accounts everywhere; they’ve got recruiters, they’ve got translators, they’ve got travel agents who set up the visas.”

She had been tracking Levy Izhak Rosenbaum’s connections for 10 years which eventually led to his arrest in July 2009 by an FBI sweep of “Operation Bid Rig” in New Jersey. It was reported by nbcnews that his case, part of a ring centered in Israel, is the first case of organ trafficking to be prosecuted in the US. This case of human organ trafficking, money laundering, political bribes, and extortion led to the arrest of 44 other people, officials and Rabbis including Hoboken Mayor Peter Cammarano III, Secaucus Mayor Dennis Elwell, Ridgefield Mayor Anthony Suarez, Jersey City Deputy Mayor Leona Beldini, state Assemblyman L. Harvey Smith and state Assemblyman Daniel Van Pelt. The five Rabbis were Saul Kassin of Shaarei Zion synagogue in Brooklyn, New York, Eliahu ben-Haim Rabbi of Congregation Ohel Yaacob in Deal, Edmond Nahum of Deal Synagogue, Mordechai Fish of Congregation Sheves Achim in Brooklyn, and his brother Lavel Schwartz. This scandal and arrest was also reported by The Guardian.

As reported by CNN, in 2000 Nancy Scheper-Hughes conducted an interview with Dr. Yehuda Hiss, who was at the time the head of the Abu Kabir forensic institute when he confessed the illegal harvesting of body organs. He explained that they used the excuse that a Palestinian prisoner needed an autopsy during which his vital body organs are extracted, which explains the long-standing Israeli army practice of murdering and kidnapping numerous numbers of young Palestinian children throughout the cities of West Bank and the Gaza Strip. She then gave the tape to Israel’s Channel 2 TV, who in turn interviewed Hiss again. Hiss confessed:

“We started to harvest corneas for various hospitals in Israel … whatever was done was highly informal. No permission was asked from the families … the harvesting also included heart valves, skin and bones.”

Maira Weiss, an Israeli researcher professor Emeritus specialized in Anthropology of Medicine, Science and the Body, published her book in Hebrew titled “Over Their Dead Bodies, Power, Knowledge, and the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Israel”, in which she dealt with the harrowing details of organ harvesting between 1996-2002 when she conducted her scientific research at Abu Kabir Forensic Institute, where she witnessed the grim reality of body organs being illicitly taken particularly from Palestinian corpses. She explains that they operated on the dead bodies of foreigners, of Israeli soldiers, and mainly of Palestinian martyrs. She explains that they extract every healthy body organ including corneas, heart valves, skin, bones, and glands. Then they fill the body with toilet paper, glue the eyelids, use broom sticks to replace bones, and extract skin from the back so that nobody can notice.

Professor Yehuda Hiss was subjected to a five-year investigation of 125 cases of organ harvesting, selling and falsifying testimonies. Although part of the evidence showed that Hiss had a “museum of skulls” in Abu Kabir including the skulls of Israeli soldiers the Israeli court in 2005 sentenced him only to a reprimand in exchange of his admittance to the act.

In July 2015, the European Parliament issued a landmark report on organ trafficking; “Trafficking in Human Organs” listing Israel as one of the central countries involved in human organs trafficking. Its introduction notes:

“Before 2000, the problem of trafficking in human organs … was primarily limited to the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia. However, following the turn of the millennium, trafficking in organs has seemingly started to spread globally, to a large extent driven by Israel doctors.”

The document went on to detail a number of high-profile organ trafficking cases. In Chapter 8 “Organ trafficking and law enforcement in Europe and beyond” the report list actual cases: the Indian Gurgaon network, The South African Netcare network, the Kosovo Medicus network, and to top these off is the American Rosenbaum network. In all but one, the evidentiary trail led directly back to Zionist Israeli state as shown in the illustration below.

The latest 2-year Israeli genocidal campaign of Gaza Palestinians were a real feast for the Israeli organ harvesting business. Israeli army had taken/kidnapped many Palestinian civilians from private homes, from schools, from churches and mosques, and from other shelters. They stripped the kidnapped civilians naked in the cold winter, trucked them into a makeshift cold desert concentration camps worse than Abu Ghraib and Nazi concentration camps. Many were tortured and murdered by the Israeli soldiers in avenging cold blood while many healthy young were driven into Israel, some would possibly end up to Abu Kabir Forensic Institute to be forced human body donors.

In November 2023 the Euro-Med Monitor had documented the Israeli army’s theft of dead Palestinian bodies from Al-Shifa Hospital and from the Indonesian Hospital in Gaza City. They also had dug up and stole bodies from a freshly makeshift cemetery in front of the hospital’s emergency department.

During the “fake” ceasefire agreement and the exchange of dead bodies of both sides, the bodies of the returned dead Israeli soldiers were intact with identifying death certificates, while the bodies of returned dead Palestinian civilians were grossly mutilated, decomposed beyond recognition and without any death certificate identifying them and how they had died. After thorough examination of the dead Palestinian bodies the renowned Palestinian British plastic and reconstructive surgeon, Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah, who spent more than a month working in Gaza’s hospitals during the genocide, stated that the bodies show signs of expert organ removal missing hearts, lungs, livers, kidneys and corneas.

After examining 120 returned dead Palestinian bodies on 17 October, many of which were still blindfolded, with their hands and feet bound, showing signs of torture, hanging or close-range gunfire and with clear evidence of organ theft, Dr. Ismail al-Thawabta, Director General of Gaza’s Government Media Office, had formally accused Israel of stealing organs from Palestinian bodies and demanded international probe.

Since Israeli crimes are mainly backed and protected by many complicit Western governments such as the US, Britain, Germany and France among others, who would not allow such an international probe to happen, Israel felt immune and encouraged to continue such heinous crime. These crimes are no longer isolated incidents or exceptions, rather they have become a systematic policy practiced regularly. They are supported and encouraged by openly televised hateful political, religious and military rhetoric that legitimizes killing and grants soldiers a complete immunity.

After the fake ceasefire Palestinian teen-agers, particularly from the West Bank, have become easy target to kill simply on suspicion, or even for merely being in the wrong place, and then their bodies are held captive never to be returned for months if ever. During last month, November 2025, Israeli soldiers had murdered in cold blood six Palestinian teen-agers, ages between 14-16 years old, and kidnaped away their bodies.

This is just a small sample of the depravity of the Jewish Zionist Israeli colony. It is worth remembering, and important to understand well, that in Jewish religious perspective Palestinians are goyim (non-Jews, like you and me), whom Jewish god, racist blood thirsty Yahweh, had created animal souls in human bodies as slaves for his chosen people.

Israel continues to “claim” tons of Palestinian tender children’s flesh, yet unlike Antonio, the merchant of Venice, who found a lawyer to protect him from Shylock’s avenging hate, the falsely self-claimed humanitarian and legal international organizations stand idly allowing this Palestinian holocaust to continue unabated.

For more detailed information/study follow the links below:

• Director of Israeli Skin bank admits taking Palestinian organs.
• Israel admits illegally harvesting organs of dead Palestinians.
• Revealed in 1990’s Israel stealing organs from Palestinian bodies.
• Israeli organ trafficking & theft: from Moldova to Palestine.
• Israeli organ harvesting: The New “Blood Libel”?
• A brief history of Israel’s theft & trafficking of Palestinian organs.
• Israel’s history of theft & trafficking of Palestinian organs.
• Israeli military accused of Palestinian organ theft again.
• I cannot unsee the photos of the tortured Palestinian hostages returned by Israel.
• Chilling accounts from Israeli prisons: torture & organ theft.

Dr. Elias Akleh is an Arab American from a Palestinian descent. His family was ethnically cleansed in 1948 from Haifa, Palestine, by the Israeli terrorist groups after stealing its land and house and moved to live in Beit-Jala/Bethlehem in the West Bank. His family was again ethnically cleansed in 1967 when the Israeli army invaded the West Bank. He lives now in the US and publishes his articles in Arabic and English on different websites.