Guardian admits "error" in slanderous headline about Israel

Guardian headline: "Israel admits harvesting Palestinian organs"

 

There were many things wrong with the Guardian headline. It implied that the Israeli government made an official admission of a crime knowingly committed by the government - that is false. The organ harvesting in question was done by the Abu Kabir Pathology laboratory and only a few people knew about it.  The headline implied that Israel admitted that the Aftonbladet story claiming Israel killed Palestinians to harvest their organs and sell them to crooked Jews in the United States. Nobody made any such admission and it is not true. Organs were harvested for medical purposes in Israel and occasionally for research purposes, and they were taken from people who were already dead, not people who were murdered in order to harvest their organs.

 

And of course, the organs were not just taken from Palestinians.

 

Guardian: Headline on Israeli organ harvesting was serious error
By Gili Izikovitch, Haaretz Correspondent

The British paper The Guardian issued a correction on Tuesday, conceding that it should not have run the headline "Israel admits harvesting Palestinian organs" on a story that, according to the correction, "did not match the article."

 

"We should not have put the headline on a story about an admission, by the former head of the Abu Kabir forensic institute near Tel Aviv, that during the 1990s specialists at the institute harvested organs" the correction on the Guardian website read.

 

"That headline did not match the article, which made clear that the organs were not taken only from Palestinians. This was a serious editing error and the headline has been changed online to reflect the text of the story written by the reporter."
 

 

The story, whose headline was changed to "Doctor admits Israeli pathologists harvested organs without consent," quoted a report by Channel 2's Ulpan Shishi last week, which included a 2000 interview with Professor Yehuda Hiss, former head of the Abu Kabir forensic institute.

 

The American anthropologist who conducted the interview in an academic capacity released it recently in the wake of a report in a Stockholm newspaper about Israeli organ harvesting in Gaza.

 

Professor Hiss said in the interview that until the 1990s, pathologists used to harvest organs, especially corneas and skin, from the bodies of soldiers, Israeli civilians, Palestinians and foreign workers, without getting consent from their families. This practice, according to the Channel 2 report, has since been abandoned.