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.

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