They admit it. Of course, they say this hasn't taken place in over a decade.
"This activity ended a decade ago and does not happen any longer."
Riiiiggghhhhhttt. Call me cynical but I do not believe them.
This all came to light starting last summer when a Swedish newspaper alleged that Israel was killing Palestinians to harvest their organs. Even more light was shed on the controversy when an interview conducted by Nancy Sheppard-Hughes, a professor of anthropology at the University of California-Berkeley, from 2000 was published with the then-head of Israel's Abu Kabir forensic institute, Dr. Jehuda Hiss. Israel's Channel 2 aired this report over the weekend.
"We started to harvest corneas ... Whatever was done was highly informal. No permission was asked from the family.
...
"We'd glue the eyelid shut," he said. "We wouldn't take corneas from families we knew would open the eyelids.""
The report also states 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.
Israel's official response to this is:
While insisting that all organ harvesting was done with permission, Israel's Health Ministry told Channel 2, "The guidelines at that time were not clear." It added, "For the last 10 years, Abu Kabir has been working according to ethics and Jewish law."
You see, the problem was that the guidelines on whether you could harvest organs from human bodies was unclear. That's all it was....
The fact this was official Israeli policy is insanely ironic, if that's even the correct term. Israel also claims the report is "ant-Semitic." Apparently it's anti-Semitic to point out that Israel was removing the skin and organs off of bodies with no permission. Uh huh.
UPDATE: Here is a link from the British newspaper The Guardian.