JERUSALEM (Map, News) - 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. 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.
2. Egypt demands return of Nefertiti bust from Germany
Egypt's antiquities chief Zahi Hawass said on Sunday that Cairo will demand the return of a 3,400 year-old bust of Queen Nefertiti, accusing Germany of fraudulently acquiring it.
Hawass, who heads the Supreme Council of Antiquities, made the announcement after talks in Cairo with Friederike Seyfried, director of the Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection at the Neues Museum in Berlin.
Hawass will "convene an extraordinary meeting to examine the steps required to officially ask for the return of the statue," a statement said. The statue was discovered in 1912 in southern Egypt by German Egyptologist Ludwig Borchardt. Hawass said that Seyfried presented him with the agreement signed in 1913 that divided archeological finds between Germany and Egypt.
He said that Borchardt deliberately described the bust as made of plaster and depicting a royal princess, "despite knowing that it was a limestone statue of Queen Nefertiti." This "proves that Borchardt wrote the description so that Germany could keep the statue," Hawass said.
"It confirms information we had that the statue left Egypt in an unethical manner and that there was fraud and deception from the German part at the time," he said, adding that the fact that Borchardt hid the bust in Germany for about 10 years before revealing it is further proof.
Egypt first requested the statue's return in 1930 but successive German governments have refused. Hawass claims that Nefertiti was sneaked out of Egypt under a coating of clay and shipped to Germany. Berlin insists it acquired the statue legally and is reluctant even to loan it to the Egyptians, citing the danger of moving the "fragile" bust.
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