A committee of experts has been appointed by Israel's health ministry to investigate claims by a Hebrew newspaper of illegal “sales of organs” and other alleged wrongdoings at Tel Aviv's L Greenberg Institute of Forensic Medicine, the country's sole institution for the performance of postmortem examinations in cases of unnatural death.
The ministry's director general, Dr Boaz Lev, named a retired district court judge to head the four member panel, along with others from the ministry, a Beersheba hospital, and the Hebrew University's institute of applied chemistry.
In a weekend magazine cover story in the Yediot Aharonot Daily, reporters Ronen Bergman and Gai Gavra claimed that the institute—headed for the past 13 years by chief pathologist Professor Yehuda Hiss—had been involved in “organ sales” of body parts. Providing much ghoulish evidence, including “price listings” for leg and thigh bones and other body parts, the investigative journalists said that whole organs had been removed from corpses and transferred to universities for research and to medical schools for “practice” by students.