Israel: The Global Leader in Human Organ Trafficking
Spanning five continents & involving rabbis, military officials and state institutions, Israel sits at the center of an international criminal conspiracy that preys on the most desperate & vulnerable.
On May 6th 2024 it was widely reported in the Turkish press that four Israelis were arrested for their part in an illegal organ trafficking operation. During raids that took place across the country, multiple properties were searched and Turkish police seized large sums of cash along with numerous fake passports and what was described as ‘digital materials’. Those arrested were charged with offences related to human organ trafficking as well as people smuggling and forgery.
This particular case involved human organs that had been obtained from Syrian refugees. The investigation into the trafficking ring began after police flagged seven people arriving from Israel for what Turkish authorities termed “health tourism”. It was later disclosed that two Syrian nationals (aged 20 and 21) had agreed to sell their kidneys to two Israeli nationals (aged 28 and 68).
Illegally harvesting human organs and trafficking them across national borders for the benefit of what is presumably a group of high paying clients is a pretty grim business. And initially this case may be waved away as a one off, something of little or no interest to British audiences – and that’s exactly how it was treated at the time by the British media – as the case was not reported on by any mainstream British news source.
The 2024 case is still ongoing, but interestingly it wasn’t the first of its kind in Turkey. In 2015 Boris Volfman, a notorious Israeli human organ trafficker who was wanted by Interpol was finally arrested by Turkish authorities. However curiously, Volfman was released by a Turkish court and the Turkish government allowed him to continue living and conducting business in Turkey for several years after his arrest, this situation drew significant criticism from opposition politicians.
But it wasn’t just the British media who decided not to cover the organ trafficking arrests that took place in Turkey in 2024, the US media also failed to report on it. It was almost as if this story wasn’t newsworthy – or maybe it was being deliberately ignored, or maybe even covered up. But why would the press do that? Well, it could have been all about timing, because the arrests in Turkey came hot on the heels of reports of organ harvesting in Gaza that had emerged just months earlier.
At the end of 2023 a report by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, an NGO working in Gaza, raised the alarm about organ theft from Palestinian bodies that had been collected and removed by Israeli forces during the invasion of Gaza.
This was reported on by Euronews, which stated the following:
The NGO claimed it has documented Israeli forces confiscating dozens of dead bodies from the al-Shifa and Indonesian hospitals in northern Gaza, alongside others in the south.
Medical professionals reportedly found vital organs, such as livers, kidneys and hearts, alongside cochleas and corneas, were missing, which the Euro-Med Monitor called “evidence” of potential organ theft.
They also claimed Israel exhumed and confiscated corpses from a mass grave that was dug more than 10 days ago in a courtyard at al-Shifa.
But disturbingly, just like the arrests in Turkey in 2024, the report by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor was not a one off. In fact, the harvesting of human parts from the bodies of dead Palestinians is something that has been reported on by other media outlets during previous conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians.
In August 2009 an article in Aftonbladet, one of Sweden’s largest daily newspapers, reported that Israeli troops were harvesting organs from Palestinians who had died in their custody. This particular story caused a furious response from the Israeli government – leading to Israeli officials demanding an explanation from the Swedish government.
The Israeli government and several US representatives went on to condemn the article as baseless and incendiary and accusations of antisemitism and blood libel against Jews soon followed. The Swedish government was then put under pressure to denounce the article – which thankfully, they didn’t.
However, the article in Aftonbladet wasn’t written in a vacuum, in fact it came hot on the heels of another similar article. Earlier in that same year the Sydney Morning Herald ran the following headline:
‘Organ trafficking’: Rabbis arrested over massive crime ring
The article revealed that US authorities had arrested 44 individuals, including numerous elected officials and several rabbis, in New Jersey as part of a large scale ‘anti-corruption’ campaign. Those arrested were charged with extortion, bribery, money laundering and human organ trafficking.
The article stated:
Although New Jersey is more famous for a history of Italian Mafia families, it was Jewish clergy who allegedly played a central role in the crime network.
Authorities raided several synagogues and among those arrested was the chief rabbi of Syrian Jews in the United States.
One rabbi, Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, was charged with conspiring to broker the sale of a human kidney for transplant.
Marra said Rosenbaum’s “business was to entice vulnerable people to give up a kidney for $US10,000 ($A12,300), which he would turn around and sell for 160,000 dollars.”
He’d allegedly been peddling kidneys for a decade.
But don’t worry, the FBI were quick to issue a statement telling the public the following:
“This case is not about politics, certainly not about religion. It is about crime. It is about criminals who use politics and religion.”
However, despite that assertion, it is highly likely that there was an ethnic aspect to this case and that the organs harvested and trafficked ended up – one way or another – in Israel. Whether that was via direct export, or because the organs were purchased by Israelis who travelled to America for transplants before heading home to Israel.
But if you think that’s the end of this, you would be very wrong. Israeli organ harvesting made the news in 2009 on more than one occasion, and the year was rounded off when an article was published in CNN detailing the Israeli state’s complicity in this ghoulish practice, the article stated the following:
Israel harvested organs from bodies in the 1990s without permission of family members, the former head of a state-run forensic laboratory said in a newly released interview.
Government officials acknowledge that the practice happened, but emphasize that it ended years ago.
In an interview in 2000, which was released to an Israeli TV channel and broadcast over the weekend, Dr. Yehuda Hiss — who was once head of the Abu Kabir forensic institute — discussed the practice.
“We started to harvest corneas for various hospitals in Israel,” Hiss said in the interview on Israel’s Channel 2 network.
“Whatever was done was highly informal. No permission was asked from the families,” he said.
Hiss said the harvesting also included heart valves, skin and bones.
No wonder the Israeli state tried to silence Aftonbladet when they dared to print their article on the topic of organ harvesting in Israel. The Israeli government was well aware of what was going on – with the establishment either turning a blind eye to the practice, or worse still, being actively involved.
In 2010, the Israeli state acted against some of the traffickers operating within its borders. Israeli law enforcement went after a number of its own citizens in an operation that shed more light on exactly who had been involved in the illegal trade. An article in the Guardian published in April of that year yielded further information about the size and scope of Israeli organ harvesting operations, the article stated:
Israel has charged five of its citizens, including a retired army general, with operating a nationwide organ trafficking ring that ensnared dozens of potential victims. The charges include human trafficking for the purpose of organ harvesting and money laundering.
But sadly, Israel’s human organ trafficking isn’t just confined to its own borders and neighbouring countries in the Middle East. In fact, the size and scope of the Israeli organ trafficking operation is far larger than what has been revealed so far. In 2013 the truly global nature of the trade began to become clear, as the Times of Israel reported on another case of Israeli organ trafficking, this time in Italy, they published the following:
Italian border authorities arrested 77-year-old Israeli citizen Gedaliah Taub on Friday on suspicion of international human organ trafficking. Taub was detained at the Rome airport after officials determined his passport was forged.
Later that same year, Haaretz, an Israeli news source, reported on a similar story, but this time the crimes took place in South America. An Israeli organ trafficking ring was uncovered in Costa Rica. Costa Rican police stated that they learned that doctors were performing kidney transplants to sell to patients in Israel. In some cases, Costa Ricans were being trafficked to Israel in order to have the surgery done in Israeli medical facilities.
Costa Rican authorities raided a number of medical laboratories and clinics suspected of involvement in the organ harvesting ring. Costa Rican Attorney General Jorge Chavarria said that two people arrested in the raids were just the “tip of the iceberg” of the organ trafficking network. One of those arrested was in touch with Israeli doctors and had been testing the suitability of the local residents whose organs were to be trafficked.
The New York Times reported on this case and identified three men – Avigad Sandler, Yaacov Dayan and Boris Volfman – as central operators in the Costa Rican operation. And yes, Boris Volfman is the same individual named earlier who was arrested for operating a similar organ trafficking ring in Turkey.
Working with the Israeli’s was Dr Francisco Mora Palma, who at the time worked as the head of nephrology at a large public hospital in San Jose. He reportedly paid donors as little as $18,500 while the syndicate charged recipients significantly more. Some donors were actually flown from Costa Rica to Israel for surgeries, while other procedures occurred in San Jose for wealthy Israeli recipients who were willing to travel.
But this was not the first major case of Israeli organ trafficking in South America. Between 2001 and 2003 an international syndicate led by Israeli brokers recruited poor Brazilians from cities like Recife to sell their kidneys in what is known as the ‘Netcare Case’ – named after the hospital group that carried out the operations.
Dozens of Brazilian men fell victim to the Israeli traffickers, often receiving between just $6,000 and $10,000 per kidney. The organs were primarily procured for wealthy Israeli patients who paid between $100,000 and $120,000 for a transplant. Donors were often flown from Brazil to Durban, South Africa, where illegal surgeries were performed at Netcare’s St. Augustine Hospital.
In 2010 Netcare pleaded guilty to 102 counts relating to these illegal transplants and paid a fine of just $1.1 million – a figure that works out at less than $11,000 for each crime they admitted to, a paltry sum when considering how much the harvested organs were sold for. Several Israeli recruiters who were named in the case, including Gaby Tauber and Ivan Da Silva, were also found guilty in a criminal court and were jailed in Brazil for their roles in the operation.
But South America isn’t the only part of the world that Israeli organ harvesters have expanded to. In 2018 a similar story dubbed the ‘Medicus Clinic Case’ was reported on by the German website Deutsche Welle. This time the arrest of an Israeli organ trafficker took place in Cyprus, but the network he was involved in was far larger and had a much greater reach than those mentioned previously, Deutsche Welle wrote the following:
Police in Cyprus have arrested an Israeli man described as the ringleader of a world-wide organ trafficking network that operated out of the tiny Balkan country of Kosovo several years ago.
Moshe Harel is accused of luring donors from eastern Europe, Turkey and the former Soviet Union to Kosovo, promising to pay them €12,000 ($14,500) for a kidney. He then allegedly charged people (most of them Israelis) in need of a kidney as much as €100,000 for the implant.
Israeli citizen Moshe Harel was identified by EU prosecutors as the mastermind or “fixer” of the ring. He matched donors from poor regions in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Turkey and Russia with wealthy recipients from Israel. At least 30 illegal transplants were carried out in the case. Despite donors being promised between €12,000 per kidney, they often received little or no payment and were left without medical care after their surgeries had taken place.
Eastern Europe and Russia have also been hot spots for this type of crime. In 2010 Ukrainian authorities arrested 12 people who were part of what is known as the ‘Surgeon Ring’. These individuals included four surgeons and an Israeli ringleader who were detaining for their part in a scheme aimed at recruiting donors online. The ring recruited mostly young women from Ukraine and other former Soviet countries, with victims being offered just $10,000 per kidney. Surgeries were performed in Kiev, Azerbaijan, and Ecuador, with the network earning an estimated $18 million per year.
Finally, in 2025, Boris Volfman was finally arrested again, this time by Russian authorities. Volfman was accused of organising a network that recruited organ donors from Russia, Moldova, Belarus, and Kazakhstan between 2006 and 2008. Volfman stands accused of heading a global criminal network that recruited vulnerable donors from as far afield as Syria, Ukraine and Moldova. He is currently facing up to 15 years in prison for allegedly supplying Russian organs to underground clinics.
The Israeli organ harvesting operation is a truly global endeavour, with cases involving Israeli citizens taking place over five continents and reports of such criminality stretching back for decades. Whilst these crimes are often ignored by the Western media, in Israel the illegal organ trade appears to be an open secret, being the subject of books, news reports and documentaries.
In 2014 an Israeli doctor named Meira Weiss published a book on the issue titled ‘Over Their Dead Bodies’. Weiss makes the claim that between 1996 and 2002 organs were illegally harvested from dead Palestinians and then used for both transplants and for medical research at Israeli universities.
The evidence presented in Meira Weiss’s book was corroborated by an Israeli television investigation that was screened the same year and included confessions from high-ranking Israeli officials that skin was taken from the bodies of dead Palestinians and African workers to treat Israelis – including being used to treat IDF soldiers who had suffered burn injuries.
The documentary featured footage of the director of the Israeli National Skin Bank who revealed that the country’s reserve of “human skin” reached 17 square meters – a huge figure relative to Israel’s population. In fact, it has been widely reported that the Israeli National Skin Bank has the world’s largest reserve of human skin.
The evidence of organ trafficking networks can be found all over the world and these networks form a worldwide spider’s web of connections – but at the centre of that web is Israel, and despite numerous cases taking place in many different countries across five continents – the common denominator in all of them is Israeli involvement.
But what is even more alarming, is that these horrific practices are not confined to back street clinics run by criminal gangs, they take place in well-known public and private clinics with victims and wealthy clients flying in and out of major cities in order to be operated on by well-paid surgeons, some of whom hold prestigious medical positions. What’s more, in Israel itself the practice takes place in state-run hospitals and universities and involves Israeli government officials, high ranking military officers and even religious leaders.
Even more concerning is the way some Israeli organ traffickers seem to be able to operate with impunity, having the ability to run illegal operations in multiple countries spread over several different continents. What’s more these illegal practices have taken place over a time span measured not in years, but in decades. Worse still is the fact that some high-profile Israeli organ traffickers have seemingly been allowed to evade justice thanks to their powerful connections with government officials within the countries that they operate.
And whilst this all seems to be an openly discussed fact in Israel, on the rare occasions when Western news outlets do dare to talk about this issue, the term antisemitism is deployed in order to stifle discussion.
But that leaves one question unanswered: Why is Israel the centre of this illegal human trafficking and organ harvesting conspiracy?
Well after some research, it appears that Israeli demand for human organs stems from Jewish religious or spiritual beliefs, which many cite as a reason as to why Israeli Jews do not sign up as organ donors, with some sources reporting as little as just 12 per cent of the Israeli population are registered as organ donors. This has left Israel as a country that has one of the lowest rates of human organ donations, whilst at the same time having an unnaturally high demand for organs per capita.
However, it does seem strange that whilst such religious folk will not donate their own organs, they are at the same time happy to be involved in the highly unethical and morally abhorrent practice of trafficking both people and human organs. And that fact shines a light on another aspect of these crimes – whilst those purchasing these organs are wealthy Israeli Jews, the victims of this trade all appear to be gentiles, many of whom give up their organs due to poverty, desperation or worse still – have their organs forcibly removed against their own will.
But of course, none of this is considered newsworthy in Britain, and Israel continues to enjoy the unequivocal support of the British government.
https://www.unz.com/article/israel-the-global-leader-in-human-organ-trafficking