Since October 2023, Israel has taken thousands of Palestinians from Gaza hostage. Some of them, Israel had disappeared alive and detained at camps like Sde Teiman, a military base frictionlessly repurposed for torture since the start of the genocide. At Sde Teiman, hostages have been subjected to gang rape, solo rape, beatings, delays in (and denial of) medical treatment necessitated following torture, mutilation disguised as medical care, amounting, inevitably, to too much for a body to bear. Among the hostages taken there was Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh, an orthopedic surgeon whose expertise, shaped through necessity, centered on treating war injuries. Surgery is all about reps; I am told he was a lifeline, literally and psychologically, for his people. Dr. Al-Bursh was likely sodomized to death after months of regular torture supervised by Israeli doctors.
In Gaza, Israel claimed it was taking truckloads of Palestinian corpses to perform DNA tests on them, to make sure none of them were Israeli. And then it kept them. No one knows how many bodies have been taken since 2023. Israel says that it holds Palestinian bodies in case it needs them in future negotiations. Sometimes, Israel hand-waves at "security reasons," sometimes it claims that the burial of this or that Palestinian might spark high valence emotions that might become a security threat, and sometimes Israel doesn't offer anything at all. Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh's body remains in Israeli custody; his people have been waiting to bury him for over a year.
What does Israel do with these bodies? In her book Over their Dead Bodies, Meira Weiss - who served as an officer in the Israeli military before becoming the head of the Israeli Forensic Institute between 1988 and 2004, then pivoting to academia - writes that during the first intifada, the Israeli army gave license to the state's main forensic institute, called Abu Kabir, to harvest "organs from Palestinians using a military regulation that an autopsy must be conducted on every killed Palestinian." The policy of performing an autopsy on all Palestinians killed "politically" (i.e., by Israelis) during the first intifada was also a carryover from their colonial patron: the British during the Mandate period required autopsies on all "suspicious" Palestinian deaths. These, back then, were conducted by a British surgeon. During the first intifada, Israel insisted on its doctors conducting them, infrequently permitting international pathologists to participate in high-profile cases. The autopsies, Weiss writes, were "accompanied by the harvesting of organs" and sometimes used for medical training. Later, as with the destruction of medical infrastructure in Gaza, Israel continued to test the limits of what it could do. The answer, it seems, is whatever.
After the bodies and their organs are taken, according to Weiss, "[Israel's] skin bank and other organ banks [use] these organs for transplantation, research, and teaching medicine." The skin - the eager medical student will tell you - is the largest organ in the body, and Israel has the largest skin bank in the world. It has existed since 1986 and was founded jointly by its military medical corps and ministry of health. Skin grafting falls under the practice of the trauma surgeon and is used primarily to "treat burn victims incurred at war or during mass casualty incidences"; Israel also provides skin to patients injured outside these contexts. In 1931, the chief Jewish rabbi of Palestine claimed that the prohibition against desecrating the dead was "unique to Jews... gentiles [had] no reason to be particularly careful about avoiding [it] if there is a natural purpose for doing so, such as medical reasons." In the years since, there had been disagreement in Israel about how and when it is religiously permissible to desecrate, in the name of science, the Jewish corpse. Traditionally, a body should go into the earth whole and stay there. Nonetheless, today Israeli medical schools acquire enough bodies for their trainees.
Examining the bodies returned to their people after the most recent so-called ceasefire, Palestinian doctors noted that, in some bodies "the rib cage and ribs were clipped with a sharp saw - a medical saw, a bone saw - and the sternum, along with the central part of the ribs, [were] lifted to allow for the removal of the heart and lungs without damage to the organ being taken." Organ procurement, with few exceptions like skin and cornea, requires that the body be either alive - via brain death - or just-dead - via circulatory death. It is plausible that some Palestinian prisoners' torture led to brain death. It is also possible their torturers felt no need to wait. Palestinian witnesses have reported that some prisoners were alive at the time they were taken for organ extraction. In one batch of bodies, the organs removed were those commonly transplanted: heart, liver, lungs. The transplant surgeon waits for a person to die; the soldier can't. The settler surgeon wields his mastery over the body to serve the state. Here, the surgeon acts as - is - a soldier.
After the first intifada, there was a notable drop in Palestinian organ harvesting at Abu Kabir, according to Weiss. One reason she offered was the opening of a Palestinian forensic institute after the Oslo Accords. Another, given by the then-manager of the Israeli forensic institute, was the persistent, precipitous decline in Palestinian health - guess from what - which rendered their organs unfit for harvest. Another reason: the shift from reliance on Palestinian to foreign laborers introduced a new "source for skin and other organs."
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For Foucault, racism - the basis of Zionist supremacy - naturalizes the logic of war (that some must die for others to live) and turns it biological. It is not simply out of necessity that Palestinians must be killed. It's right, and it should feel rewarding to do what's right; Israeli soldiers ring in the new year by firing machine gun rounds at random at Palestinian homes, laughing. It's especially hard to sustain a supremacy without obvious phenotypic difference - many Israelis are Arab, look just like us. As such, the differences between our bodies must be imposed.
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Israel's systemic mutilation of Palestinians, especially children, who today represent the largest pediatric amputee population in the world - a previously unimaginable term made possible by Israel's knack for cruelty - emerges in part because it inflicts pain, in part because it transfigures the Arab body into a marker of Jewish supremacy - think of the permanent disfiguring of the pager attacks - and in part because it drives a wedge between the Israeli and their enemy. Israelis only recognize themselves against our image. In a world like that, everything becomes relative: a limbless Palestinian child is a way to see strength in your own.
Chances are, the Israeli child grows up to be a soldier, and some soldiers fall. In The Chosen Body, Meira Weiss explores the embodied politics of Zionism, how this is articulated through the social handling of the Jewish body. The soldier's corpse, she writes, is kept "as complete and intact as possible." As evidence, she cites the prohibition against skin harvesting from the soldier, "even when the available skin meets the required standard, and even though this operation might save the life of other soldiers." And it goes beyond skin: "Soldiers' bodies also cannot be used for the development of medical skills." Speaking with the head of plastic surgery at the hospital housing Israel's major skin bank - also the former chief of medicine of the Israeli military - she learned that while the forensic institute has long used corpses "to practice on, and he had only recently learned that it never used soldiers' bodies... despite the fact that the skills learned might save the lives of other soldiers."
The article reads like Raul Hilberg.The last working-class hero in England. Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ??? - 4 November 2021 Georgina the cat ???-4 December 2025
on February 10, 2026, 10:41 pm