Head of the Zionist entity’s Abu Kabir forensic institute, Jehuda Hiss, admitted harvesting organs from martyred Palestinian bodies without the permission of their families

Head of the Zionist entity's Abu Kabir forensic institute, Jehuda Hiss, admitted harvesting organs from martyred Palestinian bodies without the permission of their families.

“We started to harvest corneas ... Whatever was done was highly informal. No permission was asked from the family,” Hiss said in an interview with an American academic in 2000. The interview was released in 2010 and part of it was aired by Israel's Channel 2 TV.

The Channel 2 report said forensic experts harvested bones, corneas, heart valves and skin from Palestinians and even foreign workers.

Palestinian Civil Affairs Minister Hussein al-Sheikh told Ma’an news agency on Wednesday that Israel has agreed to return organs of dead Palestinians harvested by its forensic pathologists during autopsies.

In the interview, Hiss described how his doctors would mask the removal of corneas from bodies. “We'd glue the eyelid shut,” he said. “We wouldn't take corneas from families we knew would open the eyelids,” Associated Press reported.