February 22, 2025
Healthcare Workers for Palestine
There are over three decades of evidence that Israeli doctors harvest Palestinian organs in direct violation of international law. These stolen body parts were not just used for transplantation and research but for sale and profit.
Healthcare Workers for Palestine
There are over three decades of evidence that Israeli doctors harvest Palestinian organs in direct violation of international law. These stolen body parts were not just used for transplantation and research but for sale and profit.
People watch as some of the 84 bodies of Palestinians handed over by
Israeli forces are buried in a mass grave, in Khan Younis, southern Gaza
Strip, on August 5, 2024. (Photo: Abdullah Abu Al-Khair / APA Images)
On August 5, 2024, three hundred and three days into their genocidal onslaught on the people of Gaza, the Israeli Occupation returned to Khan Younis the bodies of 89 Palestinians in a shipping container. The living, desperate to identify their loved ones, were met instead with the embodiment of mass death. Decomposed beyond recognition, the corpses retained none of their histories. Were these the bodies of tortured detainees? Were they corpses stolen from bulldozed graves in Gaza? The Occupation refused to say. Without the ability to do DNA testing, Palestinian officials were unable to identify the bodies and had no choice but to bury them, bag by bag, in a single large grave near Nasser Hospital.
Euro Med Monitor has also documented several such cases. The Israeli Military (IOF) were seen taking dozens of bodies from graves and the streets surrounding Al-Shifa Medical Complex and the Indonesian Hospital in the northern Gaza Strip. There were numerous accounts of this all over Gaza as well. In the aftermath of the ceasefire as people returned to areas the IOF withdrew from they found further evidence of bodies in mass graves. According to Euro Med “Concerns about organ theft from the corpses were brought up by Euro-Med Monitor, which cited reports from medical professionals in Gaza who quickly examined a few bodies after their release. These medical professionals found evidence of organ theft, including missing cochleas and corneas as well as other vital organs like livers, kidneys, and hearts.”
Zionist brutality reaches beyond death. For years, the Occupation’s war machine has laid claim to the bodies of Palestinian martyrs, not only holding them hostage, withholding their remains from their families, but also using them to perpetuate schemes of organ theft and trafficking. Israeli doctors, in direct violation of international law, have stolen Palestinian organs and Palestinian skin.
The Zionist entity’s expansionist approach to autopsies is, unsurprisingly, in direct violation of codified medical ethical standards. Take, for instance, the Nuremberg Code for medical research, which emerged in response to egregious cases of experimentation on humans (tortures, really) by Nazi doctors. Or the Declaration of Helsinki for the ethical treatment of human participants in medical research, put forward in 1964 by the World Medical Association. The core principle of both the Code and the Declaration: Any subject participating in human medical research must be able to first provide consent.
This ethical framework is not limited to the living. In 2010, the World Health Organization released separate guiding principles on cell, tissue, and organ transplantation that are rooted in the consent of the donor, whether living or deceased. Additionally, the United Nations’ International Humanitarian Law (Rule 113 and Rule 114 in particular) and The Geneva Conventions codified how the dead are handled, particularly in armed conflict. In sum: The dead must be handled with the utmost dignity, they must remain intact, there can be no mutilation of the body, and the body itself must be handed over without delay.
There exists some debate among medical professionals around how these principles should apply to prisoners of war and convicted criminals. Israel routinely uses these two categories, as well as the category of “terrorist,” to describe Palestinian martyrs in order to justify and excuse the biomedical abuses of martyrs’ bodies. This, too, should come as no surprise.
‘Organs were sold to anyone’
Testimonies of the Israeli state stealing organs from Palestinian bodies have existed over three decades. In 1990, Dr. Hatem Abu Ghazaleh, former chief health official for the West Bank, told a reporter that during the first intifada “There are indications that for one reason or another, organs, especially eyes and kidneys, were removed from the bodies during the first year or year and a half.” But the accounts of Palestinians alone are rarely given credency in international media. It wasn’t until Nancy Scheper-Hughes, an American anthropologist and activist, decided to investigate what she called “the growth of organized transplant tours run by underworld brokers” in Israel that the story began to take shape in the public eye.
In 1999, Scheper-Hughes co-founded Organs Watch, an organization that monitors organ trade and organ traffic and exposes the abuses inherent to both. Within a year, her research on these abuses led her to Israel. While testifying at a U.S. Congressional subcommittee hearing in 2001, Scheper-Hughes said that human rights groups in the West Bank had complained to her about Israeli pathologists stealing tissue and organs from the bodies of Palestinian martyrs.
In 2013, Swedish journalist Donald Boström published an article comprehensively outlining what he called “a troubling history of abuse of dead bodies” brought to the Israeli National Institute of Forensic Medicine during “the crucial and tumultuous period” between the First Intifada and the 2012 war on Gaza.
For most of the period covered in Scheper-Hughes and Boström’s work, the Forensic Institute, also known as Abu Kabir (the name of the ethnically cleansed Palestinian village it’s built upon), was run by director and chief pathologist Dr. Yehuda Hiss. In a July 2000 interview with Scheper-Hughes, Hiss freely admitted to taking skin, bones, cardiac valves, corneas, and other human materials from bodies during autopsies, saying that the families had consented to the autopsies but were not informed of these thefts. He described removing not only corneas but whole eyeballs from the bodies of the dead, which would be returned to their families with their eyelids glued shut.
Dr. Chen Kugel, Hiss’s protege, joined the Institute as a pathologist in 1999. According to Scheper-Hughes it was Kugel who alerted first the Institute’s administration and then the Israeli government about these biomedical abuses, prompting a two-year investigation during which Hiss hid most of the evidence and after which nothing much changed. Kugel, they say, was forced out of his job for speaking up. (Today, Kugel holds Hiss’s former position.)
Kugel told Scheper-Hughes that organs and tissues were, in theory, “taken from everyone, from Jews and Muslims, from soldiers and from stone throwers, from terrorists and from the victims of terrorist suicide bombers, from tourists and from immigrants.” In practice, however, it was easier to steal human materials from those the Zionists perceived to be less than human. “If there were any complaints coming from [Palestinian] families,” Kugel said, “they were the enemy and so, of course, they were lying and no one would believe them.”
In 2002 and again in 2005, Hiss was investigated for removing organs from corpses without familial consent, thefts to which he eventually admitted. After the first investigation, he was reprimanded but allowed to keep his job. After the second, he was removed as director and given a new title — senior pathologist — with a higher salary.
While his government claimed these allegations were antisemitic, Hiss boasted of what he’d done, telling Scheper-Hughes in an interview,
“Professor Hiss, viewed by many Israelis and by The New York Times as a hero because of his service to the nation in handling bodies killed by terrorists and suicide bombers, deemed his behavior as patriotic. He was, in his own mind, not so much ‘above the law,’ as representing the law, a much higher law, his law, supremely cool, rational, and scientifically and technically correct. The country was at war, blood was being spilled everyday, soldiers were being burned, and yet Israelis refused to provide tissues and organs needed. So, he would take matters into his own hands.”
Some conservative religious sects in Israel have openly endorsed these actions, manipulating Jewish law to further Jewish supremacist ideology. In 1996, Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh, the influential leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch sect, posed an ostensibly rhetorical question: “If a Jew needs a liver,” he asked, “can you take the liver of an innocent non-Jew passing by to save him? The Torah would probably permit that. Jewish life has infinite value. There is something infinitely more holy and unique about Jewish life than non-Jewish life.”
In her 2014 book Over Their Dead Bodies, former Forensic Institute employee Meira Weiss writes that during the First Intifada, the IOF “allowed [the Institute] to harvest organs from Palestinians using a military regulation that an autopsy must be conducted on every killed Palestinian. Autopsies were accompanied with organ harvest. […] Many of the workers [at the Institute] referred to the First Intifada (1987–1993) as the ‘good days,’ when organ harvesting was conducted consistently and freely compared to other periods.”
Organs weren’t just taken for transplantation and research, but for sale and profit. It is on this point that the defensive accusations of blood libel get louder. When Bostrom, in a 2009 article for the Swedish daily newspaper Aftonbladet, tried to connect the dots between the Forensic Institute’s history of organ theft and Israel’s ascendancy to what Scheper-Hughes calls “the top” of the international organ-trafficking market, there was an international outcry. Yet, to this day, the most alarming things that have been said about the Israeli organ trade have been said by Israelis themselves.
“Organs were sold to anyone; anyone that wanted organs just had to pay for them,” Kugel told Scheper-Hughes. Hearts, brains, and livers were sold for research, for presentations, for drills for medical students and surgeons.
Additionally, according to Kugel, if a client wanted all the organs from a body, that too could be arranged. The total cost: $2,500.
‘Tracing the missing’
The Occupation’s theft of organs is made possible by a wider project of stealing and withholding Palestinian bodies. The hostage remains of Palestinians are often buried in secret graves in Israeli military zones. What Israelis call “the cemeteries of numbers” can only be described as mass graves.
Israel does not always identify bodies before burying them. And on the rare occasion it returns them, they are often in various stages of decomposition or frozen so solid it would take days for Palestinians to perform their own investigations. In 2016, Dr. Saber Al-Aloul told Al Jazeera that the Occupation returned the bodies of martyrs which had been kept in morgues refrigerated to -35° C. No medical forensic work could be carried out until at least 24 to 48 hours of dethawing, which was often too long for families to wait for answers, so Dr. Aloul and colleagues at Al-Quds University performed autopsies by CT scan instead. In a time of genocide, many methods of ethical autopsy are not available.
“Tracing the missing and identifying the dead are crucial to maintain or restore basic human rights and responsible relief activities,” Doctors Without Borders says in its report, The Practical Guide to Humanitarian Law. It is difficult enough to grieve and process the trauma of loved ones being murdered by an occupying army. It is another question entirely of how to do so when their bodies are held hostage or returned incomplete.
In 2019, the Supreme Court of Israel ruled that the IOF could hold on to the bodies of Palestinian martyrs to use as bargaining chips.
These crimes have been documented by the Jerusalem Legal Aid and Human Rights Center in an 83-page report titled “The Warmth of Our Sons.” The report points out that Israel and Russia are the only states with laws that explicitly permit the withholding of bodies for counterinsurgency purposes.
Palestinian writer and revolutionary Walid Daqqa was held prisoner by the Occupation for 38 years. Despite calls for his release following a cancer diagnosis so he could receive medical treatment, his sentence was extended, and he died in custody in April. His body has yet to be returned to his family. In September, Israel’s High Court ruled that his use in a potential prisoner exchange outweighed the deceased’s right to dignity and his family’s right to a proper burial.
On October 16, the Occupation took the body of Yahya Sinwar, the military and political leader of Hamas, after killing him in battle in Tal Al Sultan, in southern Gaza. It performed a full autopsy, informing the world that Sinwar seemed not to have eaten anything during his last 72 hours. His family did not consent to the theft of his body nor to the autopsy.
Israel even holds the bodies of martyred children. It is often difficult if not impossible under apartheid systems to document who is missing and why, but according to a 2024 report from Defense for Children International, the bodies of 38 children are currently held by the Occupation.
Today, as a ceasefire takes effect, the people of Gaza are either looking for their loved ones under the rubble or waiting for them to be returned on flatbed trucks. When the Occupation is finally held responsible for its war crimes, it must be asked to account for every missing body and body part.
Euro Med Monitor has also documented several such cases. The Israeli Military (IOF) were seen taking dozens of bodies from graves and the streets surrounding Al-Shifa Medical Complex and the Indonesian Hospital in the northern Gaza Strip. There were numerous accounts of this all over Gaza as well. In the aftermath of the ceasefire as people returned to areas the IOF withdrew from they found further evidence of bodies in mass graves. According to Euro Med “Concerns about organ theft from the corpses were brought up by Euro-Med Monitor, which cited reports from medical professionals in Gaza who quickly examined a few bodies after their release. These medical professionals found evidence of organ theft, including missing cochleas and corneas as well as other vital organs like livers, kidneys, and hearts.”
Zionist brutality reaches beyond death. For years, the Occupation’s war machine has laid claim to the bodies of Palestinian martyrs, not only holding them hostage, withholding their remains from their families, but also using them to perpetuate schemes of organ theft and trafficking. Israeli doctors, in direct violation of international law, have stolen Palestinian organs and Palestinian skin.
The Zionist entity’s expansionist approach to autopsies is, unsurprisingly, in direct violation of codified medical ethical standards. Take, for instance, the Nuremberg Code for medical research, which emerged in response to egregious cases of experimentation on humans (tortures, really) by Nazi doctors. Or the Declaration of Helsinki for the ethical treatment of human participants in medical research, put forward in 1964 by the World Medical Association. The core principle of both the Code and the Declaration: Any subject participating in human medical research must be able to first provide consent.
This ethical framework is not limited to the living. In 2010, the World Health Organization released separate guiding principles on cell, tissue, and organ transplantation that are rooted in the consent of the donor, whether living or deceased. Additionally, the United Nations’ International Humanitarian Law (Rule 113 and Rule 114 in particular) and The Geneva Conventions codified how the dead are handled, particularly in armed conflict. In sum: The dead must be handled with the utmost dignity, they must remain intact, there can be no mutilation of the body, and the body itself must be handed over without delay.
There exists some debate among medical professionals around how these principles should apply to prisoners of war and convicted criminals. Israel routinely uses these two categories, as well as the category of “terrorist,” to describe Palestinian martyrs in order to justify and excuse the biomedical abuses of martyrs’ bodies. This, too, should come as no surprise.
‘Organs were sold to anyone’
Testimonies of the Israeli state stealing organs from Palestinian bodies have existed over three decades. In 1990, Dr. Hatem Abu Ghazaleh, former chief health official for the West Bank, told a reporter that during the first intifada “There are indications that for one reason or another, organs, especially eyes and kidneys, were removed from the bodies during the first year or year and a half.” But the accounts of Palestinians alone are rarely given credency in international media. It wasn’t until Nancy Scheper-Hughes, an American anthropologist and activist, decided to investigate what she called “the growth of organized transplant tours run by underworld brokers” in Israel that the story began to take shape in the public eye.
In 1999, Scheper-Hughes co-founded Organs Watch, an organization that monitors organ trade and organ traffic and exposes the abuses inherent to both. Within a year, her research on these abuses led her to Israel. While testifying at a U.S. Congressional subcommittee hearing in 2001, Scheper-Hughes said that human rights groups in the West Bank had complained to her about Israeli pathologists stealing tissue and organs from the bodies of Palestinian martyrs.
In 2013, Swedish journalist Donald Boström published an article comprehensively outlining what he called “a troubling history of abuse of dead bodies” brought to the Israeli National Institute of Forensic Medicine during “the crucial and tumultuous period” between the First Intifada and the 2012 war on Gaza.
For most of the period covered in Scheper-Hughes and Boström’s work, the Forensic Institute, also known as Abu Kabir (the name of the ethnically cleansed Palestinian village it’s built upon), was run by director and chief pathologist Dr. Yehuda Hiss. In a July 2000 interview with Scheper-Hughes, Hiss freely admitted to taking skin, bones, cardiac valves, corneas, and other human materials from bodies during autopsies, saying that the families had consented to the autopsies but were not informed of these thefts. He described removing not only corneas but whole eyeballs from the bodies of the dead, which would be returned to their families with their eyelids glued shut.
Dr. Chen Kugel, Hiss’s protege, joined the Institute as a pathologist in 1999. According to Scheper-Hughes it was Kugel who alerted first the Institute’s administration and then the Israeli government about these biomedical abuses, prompting a two-year investigation during which Hiss hid most of the evidence and after which nothing much changed. Kugel, they say, was forced out of his job for speaking up. (Today, Kugel holds Hiss’s former position.)
Kugel told Scheper-Hughes that organs and tissues were, in theory, “taken from everyone, from Jews and Muslims, from soldiers and from stone throwers, from terrorists and from the victims of terrorist suicide bombers, from tourists and from immigrants.” In practice, however, it was easier to steal human materials from those the Zionists perceived to be less than human. “If there were any complaints coming from [Palestinian] families,” Kugel said, “they were the enemy and so, of course, they were lying and no one would believe them.”
In 2002 and again in 2005, Hiss was investigated for removing organs from corpses without familial consent, thefts to which he eventually admitted. After the first investigation, he was reprimanded but allowed to keep his job. After the second, he was removed as director and given a new title — senior pathologist — with a higher salary.
While his government claimed these allegations were antisemitic, Hiss boasted of what he’d done, telling Scheper-Hughes in an interview,
“Now, about the question of harvesting organs — it’s strange. Not only here, in Israel, but elsewhere, it all depends on the personal approach of those in charge of pathology or organ harvesting. In my case, when I was a resident in Tel Hashomer [Hospital] we would collaborate with the army, and we would provide the army with grafted (harvested) skin for burn victims, and, from time to time, they would ask us for cornea. So, I would be involved in it because I was in charge, with two others, and we would provide this.”
In 2010, writing for the leftist magazine CounterPunch, Scheper-Hughes outlined the ethnonationalist justification for the scheme:
“Professor Hiss, viewed by many Israelis and by The New York Times as a hero because of his service to the nation in handling bodies killed by terrorists and suicide bombers, deemed his behavior as patriotic. He was, in his own mind, not so much ‘above the law,’ as representing the law, a much higher law, his law, supremely cool, rational, and scientifically and technically correct. The country was at war, blood was being spilled everyday, soldiers were being burned, and yet Israelis refused to provide tissues and organs needed. So, he would take matters into his own hands.”
Some conservative religious sects in Israel have openly endorsed these actions, manipulating Jewish law to further Jewish supremacist ideology. In 1996, Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh, the influential leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch sect, posed an ostensibly rhetorical question: “If a Jew needs a liver,” he asked, “can you take the liver of an innocent non-Jew passing by to save him? The Torah would probably permit that. Jewish life has infinite value. There is something infinitely more holy and unique about Jewish life than non-Jewish life.”
In her 2014 book Over Their Dead Bodies, former Forensic Institute employee Meira Weiss writes that during the First Intifada, the IOF “allowed [the Institute] to harvest organs from Palestinians using a military regulation that an autopsy must be conducted on every killed Palestinian. Autopsies were accompanied with organ harvest. […] Many of the workers [at the Institute] referred to the First Intifada (1987–1993) as the ‘good days,’ when organ harvesting was conducted consistently and freely compared to other periods.”
Organs weren’t just taken for transplantation and research, but for sale and profit. It is on this point that the defensive accusations of blood libel get louder. When Bostrom, in a 2009 article for the Swedish daily newspaper Aftonbladet, tried to connect the dots between the Forensic Institute’s history of organ theft and Israel’s ascendancy to what Scheper-Hughes calls “the top” of the international organ-trafficking market, there was an international outcry. Yet, to this day, the most alarming things that have been said about the Israeli organ trade have been said by Israelis themselves.
“Organs were sold to anyone; anyone that wanted organs just had to pay for them,” Kugel told Scheper-Hughes. Hearts, brains, and livers were sold for research, for presentations, for drills for medical students and surgeons.
Additionally, according to Kugel, if a client wanted all the organs from a body, that too could be arranged. The total cost: $2,500.
‘Tracing the missing’
The Occupation’s theft of organs is made possible by a wider project of stealing and withholding Palestinian bodies. The hostage remains of Palestinians are often buried in secret graves in Israeli military zones. What Israelis call “the cemeteries of numbers” can only be described as mass graves.
Israel does not always identify bodies before burying them. And on the rare occasion it returns them, they are often in various stages of decomposition or frozen so solid it would take days for Palestinians to perform their own investigations. In 2016, Dr. Saber Al-Aloul told Al Jazeera that the Occupation returned the bodies of martyrs which had been kept in morgues refrigerated to -35° C. No medical forensic work could be carried out until at least 24 to 48 hours of dethawing, which was often too long for families to wait for answers, so Dr. Aloul and colleagues at Al-Quds University performed autopsies by CT scan instead. In a time of genocide, many methods of ethical autopsy are not available.
“Tracing the missing and identifying the dead are crucial to maintain or restore basic human rights and responsible relief activities,” Doctors Without Borders says in its report, The Practical Guide to Humanitarian Law. It is difficult enough to grieve and process the trauma of loved ones being murdered by an occupying army. It is another question entirely of how to do so when their bodies are held hostage or returned incomplete.
In 2019, the Supreme Court of Israel ruled that the IOF could hold on to the bodies of Palestinian martyrs to use as bargaining chips.
These crimes have been documented by the Jerusalem Legal Aid and Human Rights Center in an 83-page report titled “The Warmth of Our Sons.” The report points out that Israel and Russia are the only states with laws that explicitly permit the withholding of bodies for counterinsurgency purposes.
Palestinian writer and revolutionary Walid Daqqa was held prisoner by the Occupation for 38 years. Despite calls for his release following a cancer diagnosis so he could receive medical treatment, his sentence was extended, and he died in custody in April. His body has yet to be returned to his family. In September, Israel’s High Court ruled that his use in a potential prisoner exchange outweighed the deceased’s right to dignity and his family’s right to a proper burial.
On October 16, the Occupation took the body of Yahya Sinwar, the military and political leader of Hamas, after killing him in battle in Tal Al Sultan, in southern Gaza. It performed a full autopsy, informing the world that Sinwar seemed not to have eaten anything during his last 72 hours. His family did not consent to the theft of his body nor to the autopsy.
Israel even holds the bodies of martyred children. It is often difficult if not impossible under apartheid systems to document who is missing and why, but according to a 2024 report from Defense for Children International, the bodies of 38 children are currently held by the Occupation.
Today, as a ceasefire takes effect, the people of Gaza are either looking for their loved ones under the rubble or waiting for them to be returned on flatbed trucks. When the Occupation is finally held responsible for its war crimes, it must be asked to account for every missing body and body part.
Jonathan Ofir
Media coverage of the shooting of two Israeli tourists who were mistaken for Palestinians ignored the root cause of the violence: Zionism.
On Sunday, a 27-year-old Jewish man in Miami Beach named Mordechai Brafman, shot 17 rounds at a father and his son, Yarin and Ari Rabi because he believed “they were Palestinian.” Brafman’s social media profile seems to indicate an interest in Jewish vigilante groups and he thought he had killed them but they were only wounded. And it turned out that the two were actually Israeli tourists.
The story then had another bizarre twist: the son who had been shot, Ari Rabi, posted on social media that he was a victim of attempted murder for antisemitic reasons – a post which was later deleted:
The call for “death to Arabs” has basically been sanitized from Israeli media reporting. In an interview on Israeli Channel 13, Wednesday, the father and the son were asked:
“When you found out that he was Jewish, the shooter, and the reason he shot…”
Yarin, the father: “We didn’t find out immediately that he’s Jewish, only after we went to the FBI offices, then we realized it’s a Jewish guy.”
Interviewer: “And after you realized, when it turned out he simply mistook your identity?”
Yarin: “I don’t know what to say, I’m in shock”.
Now Ari, the son who earlier went “death to Arabs” comes in:
“It doesn’t matter what we are, Jews, Russians, Arabs, it doesn’t matter – no human being has the right to take the life of another human being, do you agree with me?”
Interviewer: “Of course, no question about it”.
So now, evidently, “Death to Arabs” Ari has become a professor of international law and a great humanist.
Ignoring the root cause: Zionism
The New York Times headlined their report of the case thus: “Florida Man Blames Mental Health Crisis for Shooting of Israeli Tourists.” Such framing is not innocent. It is strategically devoid of the main elements that are crucial to the case. It is not just important that Brafman is Jewish (they mention in the article), but that he was Zionist (which they never mention), and that he was anti-Palestinian. The “Florida man” and the fact that his lawyer says his client was experiencing “a severe mental health crisis which caused him to be in fear for his life” are ancillary matters.
But if not solely explained by mental illness, how can we understand the root of this violence? Ironically, it is the response by the victim of the shooting Ari Rabi that reveals the shooter’s true motive.
While there might have been mental health issues, the intent of the attack was quite clear and singularly racist, anti-Palestinian, and Rabi’s call for “death to Arabs” confirms that anti-Palestnian hate is not an incidental outlier or one-off mental disease. It is an ideological Zionist phenomenon not isolated by geography.
Rabi preceded his call for the death of Arabs with a core Zionist slogan, “Am Israel chai.” This was not a coincidence. It is an articulation of a Zionist societal understanding – we live as a “people of Israel” because “Arabs,” that is Palestinians, are killed.
Rabi’s response to the shooting, with the assumed anti-Jewish motive, released a reflexive genocidal call for the annihilation of Palestinians. This call was quickly dropped when it became clear that this was a “mistaken identity” shooting – but this only serves to prove the point. Rabi could only imagine that the person who targeted him was Palestinian, and his only response was to call for mass killings. This is a result of Zionism which only sees Palestinians as violent threats and sees Palestinian death as necessary for Zionism’s survival.
Open season on Palestinians, or anyone assumed to be
The “mistaken identity” aspect of this story is important to focus on too, as it provides further evidence. Brafman’s “mistake” in itself does not change the precision of his intent.
Such “mistaken identity” shootings by Jewish Israelis actually occur more times than one might think. In 2016, during what was called the “lone wolf intifada”, the killing frenzy among Jewish Israelis was particularly high. The current Israeli ‘liberal’ opposition leader Yair Lapid, opined at the time that “whoever takes out a knife or a screwdriver – should be shot dead” [my emphasis]. Sometimes it was simply enough to have a dark skin complexion, to be mistaken for a “Palestinian terrorist”, and this would sometimes result in a violent lynching, like in the case of the Eritrean refugee Habtom Zerhom – a lynching that was celebrated live on mainstream Israeli television.
And then there is the “shooting of one’s own” as when Israeli soldiers in Gaza, itching to shoot anything that moves in a given area, shoot Israeli hostages. This happened in December 2023, when three Israeli hostages (one was a Palestinian with Israeli citizenship) who had managed to separate from their captors a few days earlier, stood shirtless, waved white flags, and hung out a big banner upon which they wrote, with leftover food in Hebrew: “Help, 3 kidnapped”. Two of them were shot by an Israeli sniper who, according to the Israeli army felt “threatened”, from dozens of meters away, and the third was shot immediately after, while attempting to flee down the staircase.
The Israeli military investigation concluded that the shooting could have been avoided, but that there was no malice involved.
Why should the reflexive killing of assumed Palestinians ever involve malice? It is, after all, a second nature for so many Israelis. Unless the Israeli soldiers are told not to shoot, they shoot, that’s just the standard.
Shooting Palestinians just for being who they are, is a practice that has been repeated countless times in the Gaza genocide. Recently, one particular case was exposed recently in Israeli media (The Hottest Place in Hell in Hebrew, then +972 Magazine in English), of an elderly couple who was gunned down in the street in Gaza City. The man, over 80 years old, was used by Israeli soldiers as a human shield just prior to his murder. The soldiers wrapped an explosive cord around his neck and an explosive belt, threatening that “if he did anything wrong or didn’t follow orders, the soldier behind him would pull the cord, and his head would be torn from his body”. After eight hours of this, the couple was ordered to evacuate toward the “humanitarian zone” in southern Gaza. “After 100 meters, the other battalion saw them and immediately shot them,” a soldier said. “They died like that, in the street.”
This story more than any other shows Zionism’s disdain for Palestinian life. We have seen this in Gaza for the last year and a half, we have seen this in Palestine for the last 75 years, and we saw this dehumanization and genocidal impulse in Miami last weekend.
On Sunday, a 27-year-old Jewish man in Miami Beach named Mordechai Brafman, shot 17 rounds at a father and his son, Yarin and Ari Rabi because he believed “they were Palestinian.” Brafman’s social media profile seems to indicate an interest in Jewish vigilante groups and he thought he had killed them but they were only wounded. And it turned out that the two were actually Israeli tourists.
The story then had another bizarre twist: the son who had been shot, Ari Rabi, posted on social media that he was a victim of attempted murder for antisemitic reasons – a post which was later deleted:
“My father and I experienced attempted murder on antisemitic background. They tried to murder us in the heart of Miami, but God is with us, so it didn’t workout for him. I want to say thank you to everyone for the support and that we don’t take it for granted. Am Israel chai 🇮🇱 [the people of Israel live]. Death to Arabs 🙏”.
So Brafman wanted the death of the two Israelis because he thought they were Palestinian, and one of the victims wanted “death to Arabs” (read: Palestinians) because he thought he was targeted for being a Jew.
The call for “death to Arabs” has basically been sanitized from Israeli media reporting. In an interview on Israeli Channel 13, Wednesday, the father and the son were asked:
“When you found out that he was Jewish, the shooter, and the reason he shot…”
Yarin, the father: “We didn’t find out immediately that he’s Jewish, only after we went to the FBI offices, then we realized it’s a Jewish guy.”
Interviewer: “And after you realized, when it turned out he simply mistook your identity?”
Yarin: “I don’t know what to say, I’m in shock”.
Now Ari, the son who earlier went “death to Arabs” comes in:
“It doesn’t matter what we are, Jews, Russians, Arabs, it doesn’t matter – no human being has the right to take the life of another human being, do you agree with me?”
Interviewer: “Of course, no question about it”.
So now, evidently, “Death to Arabs” Ari has become a professor of international law and a great humanist.
Ignoring the root cause: Zionism
The New York Times headlined their report of the case thus: “Florida Man Blames Mental Health Crisis for Shooting of Israeli Tourists.” Such framing is not innocent. It is strategically devoid of the main elements that are crucial to the case. It is not just important that Brafman is Jewish (they mention in the article), but that he was Zionist (which they never mention), and that he was anti-Palestinian. The “Florida man” and the fact that his lawyer says his client was experiencing “a severe mental health crisis which caused him to be in fear for his life” are ancillary matters.
But if not solely explained by mental illness, how can we understand the root of this violence? Ironically, it is the response by the victim of the shooting Ari Rabi that reveals the shooter’s true motive.
While there might have been mental health issues, the intent of the attack was quite clear and singularly racist, anti-Palestinian, and Rabi’s call for “death to Arabs” confirms that anti-Palestnian hate is not an incidental outlier or one-off mental disease. It is an ideological Zionist phenomenon not isolated by geography.
Rabi preceded his call for the death of Arabs with a core Zionist slogan, “Am Israel chai.” This was not a coincidence. It is an articulation of a Zionist societal understanding – we live as a “people of Israel” because “Arabs,” that is Palestinians, are killed.
Rabi’s response to the shooting, with the assumed anti-Jewish motive, released a reflexive genocidal call for the annihilation of Palestinians. This call was quickly dropped when it became clear that this was a “mistaken identity” shooting – but this only serves to prove the point. Rabi could only imagine that the person who targeted him was Palestinian, and his only response was to call for mass killings. This is a result of Zionism which only sees Palestinians as violent threats and sees Palestinian death as necessary for Zionism’s survival.
Open season on Palestinians, or anyone assumed to be
The “mistaken identity” aspect of this story is important to focus on too, as it provides further evidence. Brafman’s “mistake” in itself does not change the precision of his intent.
Such “mistaken identity” shootings by Jewish Israelis actually occur more times than one might think. In 2016, during what was called the “lone wolf intifada”, the killing frenzy among Jewish Israelis was particularly high. The current Israeli ‘liberal’ opposition leader Yair Lapid, opined at the time that “whoever takes out a knife or a screwdriver – should be shot dead” [my emphasis]. Sometimes it was simply enough to have a dark skin complexion, to be mistaken for a “Palestinian terrorist”, and this would sometimes result in a violent lynching, like in the case of the Eritrean refugee Habtom Zerhom – a lynching that was celebrated live on mainstream Israeli television.
And then there is the “shooting of one’s own” as when Israeli soldiers in Gaza, itching to shoot anything that moves in a given area, shoot Israeli hostages. This happened in December 2023, when three Israeli hostages (one was a Palestinian with Israeli citizenship) who had managed to separate from their captors a few days earlier, stood shirtless, waved white flags, and hung out a big banner upon which they wrote, with leftover food in Hebrew: “Help, 3 kidnapped”. Two of them were shot by an Israeli sniper who, according to the Israeli army felt “threatened”, from dozens of meters away, and the third was shot immediately after, while attempting to flee down the staircase.
The Israeli military investigation concluded that the shooting could have been avoided, but that there was no malice involved.
Why should the reflexive killing of assumed Palestinians ever involve malice? It is, after all, a second nature for so many Israelis. Unless the Israeli soldiers are told not to shoot, they shoot, that’s just the standard.
Shooting Palestinians just for being who they are, is a practice that has been repeated countless times in the Gaza genocide. Recently, one particular case was exposed recently in Israeli media (The Hottest Place in Hell in Hebrew, then +972 Magazine in English), of an elderly couple who was gunned down in the street in Gaza City. The man, over 80 years old, was used by Israeli soldiers as a human shield just prior to his murder. The soldiers wrapped an explosive cord around his neck and an explosive belt, threatening that “if he did anything wrong or didn’t follow orders, the soldier behind him would pull the cord, and his head would be torn from his body”. After eight hours of this, the couple was ordered to evacuate toward the “humanitarian zone” in southern Gaza. “After 100 meters, the other battalion saw them and immediately shot them,” a soldier said. “They died like that, in the street.”
This story more than any other shows Zionism’s disdain for Palestinian life. We have seen this in Gaza for the last year and a half, we have seen this in Palestine for the last 75 years, and we saw this dehumanization and genocidal impulse in Miami last weekend.
February 21, 2025
Tareq S. Hajjaj
Palestinians in Gaza say that Israel is violating the ceasefire’s humanitarian agreements in order to force them to leave their homeland.
Tareq S. Hajjaj
Palestinians in Gaza say that Israel is violating the ceasefire’s humanitarian agreements in order to force them to leave their homeland.
Even though a ceasefire started just over a month ago, Israel is still working to make Gaza unlivable.
Newly erected tents in al-Zeitoun neighborhood in Gaza City, February 18, 2025. (Photo: Omar Ashtawy/APA Images)
On Monday, the Gaza Government Media Office stated that only 30% of the supplies that were supposed to enter the strip in accordance with the ceasefire agreement have been let in. According to the agreement, Israel is supposed to let in 600 trucks of aid per day, including 50 trucks of fuel, and a total of 200,000 tents and 60,000 prefabricated mobile homes during the first phase of the ceasefire. The Government Media Office said that Israel has only let in 8,500 trucks out of the total 12,000 (in northern Gaza, only 2,916 instead of 6,000), less than half the intended number of tents, and only a handful of mobile homes.
The practical result of this policy is that, without the humanitarian aid stipulated in the ceasefire deal, Gaza remains uninhabitable. This has pushed some Palestinians to consider leaving Gaza until they are able to return. Hundreds of thousands have already fled to Egypt since the beginning of the war, and many more are looking to join them. Others, however, vow that they will not leave Gaza no matter what.
‘There’s nothing voluntary about it’
In October 2023, Israel’s initial goal for the war was to push Palestinians into the Sinai under the pretext of providing a “humanitarian corridor” for the civilian population. After Egypt refused to be complicit in the plan, the genocidal nature of Israel’s war took center stage.
But even after the ceasefire came into effect, Israel sought to continue the war through other means, intentionally stalling the delivery of humanitarian aid — in violation of the ceasefire’s terms — in order to keep living conditions in Gaza unbearable. The objective of this strategy is clear: to push Palestinians to abandon their homeland or die. The commonly applied euphemism for this process is “voluntary emigration.”
This is what led Hamas to suspend its intended release of Israeli captives last week, citing Israel’s systematic violations of the humanitarian protocols of the ceasefire. After receiving assurances from mediators that Israel would start letting in tents, mobile homes, and heavy machinery for the removal of rubble, Hamas proceeded to release the captives as planned. Since then, however, the amount of aid Israel has allowed to enter has not seen a substantial increase.
Ihab Salama, 63, a father of three, recently returned to his home in Gaza City with his family. The Israeli army had destroyed his house, so he rented a new place in the city to stay. During the last several months, he has been trying to get out of Gaza temporarily but could not due to the closure of the Rafah crossing with Egypt since May 2024.
“I want to leave, but there’s nothing voluntary about it,” Salama told Mondoweiss. “Israel is forcing us to leave. Its army destroyed everything. There are no schools for my kids, no hospitals, we struggle every day to get water. There’s no electricity. But most of all, we don’t know when our homes will be rebuilt. Who wants his family to live and suffer in such conditions?”
Salama explains that he desires to catch a respite from 15 months of war until such a time that Gaza’s fate becomes clear and he has a viable homeland to return to. “I’ve been to most countries of the world. I could’ve stayed there in the past, but I preferred to go back to my home. I refused to immigrate every time. But now, if I can, I may leave.”
Salama clarifies that the current circumstances aren’t the only factors pulling him in this direction; most of Salama’s extended family has already left Gaza for different parts of the world. “I do not feel safe. Our lives are on the edge, and most of my friends and relatives who could leave have left. They will come back someday, as they say, but they could not handle the situation.”
But not everyone in Gaza is willing to leave; some never have, vowing to stay under any conditions. Hundreds of thousands made a historic return march in late January to northern Gaza, returning to the rubble of their destroyed homes and setting up tents nearby.
Muhammad Sultan, 26, has settled in al-Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip in a tent with his six family members, who preferred to stay next to their destroyed home until they could rebuild it.
“This is not the first time Israel talks about forcing us to leave our homeland, and it will not be the last,” Sultan told Mondoweiss. “From the very first moment they established their state, they have wished for us to be cast into the sea.”
Sultan explains that supporters of Trump’s proposed plan for Palestinians to leave Gaza and resettle elsewhere do not understand what home means. “It’s not a place we can change or leave. It’s our roots, our family, our memories. It’s everything we know.”
“We know our enemy,” Sultan continued. “We know its intention. Israel has been trying to push us to leave forever.”
‘I have no place but Gaza’
During the war, almost 100,000 people fled Gaza into Egypt. Most of them remain stranded there to this day, unable to return. Currently, the Rafah crossing has only reopened in one direction. Only patients are allowed to leave Gaza for treatment in Egypt and other countries.
Islam Abed Rabbo fled from Khan Younis to Cairo with his two daughters last April after his wife was killed in an Israeli airstrike in the city. He was able to rescue his two daughters, Amira, 13, and Lana, 6, but he lives in constant longing for Gaza.
“I have no place but Gaza,” Abed Rabbo told Mondoweiss. “It is where I belong. I do not want to live anywhere else.”
Abed Rabbo says he does not enjoy complete freedom in Cairo, unable to work or obtain residency, but admits that Egypt “treats us with great hospitality.”
“We are guests in Cairo. Egyptians love and support us, but we are not in our country and always feel like guests,” Abed Rabbo clarified. “We must return to our homeland.”
Abed Rabbo and his family eagerly await the reopening of the Rafah crossing so they can return to Gaza. For him, return is inevitable.
Others who fled to Egypt during the war do not intend to return until Gaza’s circumstances improve. The majority of Gazans displaced during the war lost everything they owned — homes, families, and entire neighborhoods.
Eman Hamid, 56, arrived in Cairo in February with her ailing husband. Her house in the Zeitoun neighborhood in Gaza City was bombed while her family was inside. Miraculously, everyone escaped with only light injuries, except for her husband, whose wounds were exacerbated by the lack of available treatment throughout the war. Although over half her family remains in Gaza, she now thinks of a way to get them out.
“We’ve been through what no one else on earth has ever experienced,” Hamid told Mondoweiss. “When there was shelling next to us, I would turn my face and close my eyes. I didn’t want to see more than what I’d already seen. I don’t want to continue living like this.”
“I want to see my children grow up and raise their families,” she continued. “Not killed and their bodies eaten by stray animals in the streets. The Israeli army has robbed us of our humanity.”
Hamid is quick to point out that she sees no long-term alternative for her and her family. But she believes that she has a right to live in peace and quiet, even if for just a temporary period of time.
“We have remained steadfast and resilient our entire lives in our homeland,” she explained. “This is our nature as an oppressed and occupied people. But I want to rest a little, to be happy with my first granddaughter, and to be able to give hope and reassurance to my children.”
She does not know where she will go next, but she feels relieved that she lives in a place where life’s necessities — water, food, and electricity — are readily available.
“I just want to know what safety feels like, even if for just a little,” she said.
‘There’s nothing voluntary about it’
In October 2023, Israel’s initial goal for the war was to push Palestinians into the Sinai under the pretext of providing a “humanitarian corridor” for the civilian population. After Egypt refused to be complicit in the plan, the genocidal nature of Israel’s war took center stage.
But even after the ceasefire came into effect, Israel sought to continue the war through other means, intentionally stalling the delivery of humanitarian aid — in violation of the ceasefire’s terms — in order to keep living conditions in Gaza unbearable. The objective of this strategy is clear: to push Palestinians to abandon their homeland or die. The commonly applied euphemism for this process is “voluntary emigration.”
This is what led Hamas to suspend its intended release of Israeli captives last week, citing Israel’s systematic violations of the humanitarian protocols of the ceasefire. After receiving assurances from mediators that Israel would start letting in tents, mobile homes, and heavy machinery for the removal of rubble, Hamas proceeded to release the captives as planned. Since then, however, the amount of aid Israel has allowed to enter has not seen a substantial increase.
Ihab Salama, 63, a father of three, recently returned to his home in Gaza City with his family. The Israeli army had destroyed his house, so he rented a new place in the city to stay. During the last several months, he has been trying to get out of Gaza temporarily but could not due to the closure of the Rafah crossing with Egypt since May 2024.
“I want to leave, but there’s nothing voluntary about it,” Salama told Mondoweiss. “Israel is forcing us to leave. Its army destroyed everything. There are no schools for my kids, no hospitals, we struggle every day to get water. There’s no electricity. But most of all, we don’t know when our homes will be rebuilt. Who wants his family to live and suffer in such conditions?”
Salama explains that he desires to catch a respite from 15 months of war until such a time that Gaza’s fate becomes clear and he has a viable homeland to return to. “I’ve been to most countries of the world. I could’ve stayed there in the past, but I preferred to go back to my home. I refused to immigrate every time. But now, if I can, I may leave.”
Salama clarifies that the current circumstances aren’t the only factors pulling him in this direction; most of Salama’s extended family has already left Gaza for different parts of the world. “I do not feel safe. Our lives are on the edge, and most of my friends and relatives who could leave have left. They will come back someday, as they say, but they could not handle the situation.”
But not everyone in Gaza is willing to leave; some never have, vowing to stay under any conditions. Hundreds of thousands made a historic return march in late January to northern Gaza, returning to the rubble of their destroyed homes and setting up tents nearby.
Muhammad Sultan, 26, has settled in al-Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip in a tent with his six family members, who preferred to stay next to their destroyed home until they could rebuild it.
“This is not the first time Israel talks about forcing us to leave our homeland, and it will not be the last,” Sultan told Mondoweiss. “From the very first moment they established their state, they have wished for us to be cast into the sea.”
Sultan explains that supporters of Trump’s proposed plan for Palestinians to leave Gaza and resettle elsewhere do not understand what home means. “It’s not a place we can change or leave. It’s our roots, our family, our memories. It’s everything we know.”
“We know our enemy,” Sultan continued. “We know its intention. Israel has been trying to push us to leave forever.”
‘I have no place but Gaza’
During the war, almost 100,000 people fled Gaza into Egypt. Most of them remain stranded there to this day, unable to return. Currently, the Rafah crossing has only reopened in one direction. Only patients are allowed to leave Gaza for treatment in Egypt and other countries.
Islam Abed Rabbo fled from Khan Younis to Cairo with his two daughters last April after his wife was killed in an Israeli airstrike in the city. He was able to rescue his two daughters, Amira, 13, and Lana, 6, but he lives in constant longing for Gaza.
“I have no place but Gaza,” Abed Rabbo told Mondoweiss. “It is where I belong. I do not want to live anywhere else.”
Abed Rabbo says he does not enjoy complete freedom in Cairo, unable to work or obtain residency, but admits that Egypt “treats us with great hospitality.”
“We are guests in Cairo. Egyptians love and support us, but we are not in our country and always feel like guests,” Abed Rabbo clarified. “We must return to our homeland.”
Abed Rabbo and his family eagerly await the reopening of the Rafah crossing so they can return to Gaza. For him, return is inevitable.
Others who fled to Egypt during the war do not intend to return until Gaza’s circumstances improve. The majority of Gazans displaced during the war lost everything they owned — homes, families, and entire neighborhoods.
Eman Hamid, 56, arrived in Cairo in February with her ailing husband. Her house in the Zeitoun neighborhood in Gaza City was bombed while her family was inside. Miraculously, everyone escaped with only light injuries, except for her husband, whose wounds were exacerbated by the lack of available treatment throughout the war. Although over half her family remains in Gaza, she now thinks of a way to get them out.
“We’ve been through what no one else on earth has ever experienced,” Hamid told Mondoweiss. “When there was shelling next to us, I would turn my face and close my eyes. I didn’t want to see more than what I’d already seen. I don’t want to continue living like this.”
“I want to see my children grow up and raise their families,” she continued. “Not killed and their bodies eaten by stray animals in the streets. The Israeli army has robbed us of our humanity.”
Hamid is quick to point out that she sees no long-term alternative for her and her family. But she believes that she has a right to live in peace and quiet, even if for just a temporary period of time.
“We have remained steadfast and resilient our entire lives in our homeland,” she explained. “This is our nature as an oppressed and occupied people. But I want to rest a little, to be happy with my first granddaughter, and to be able to give hope and reassurance to my children.”
She does not know where she will go next, but she feels relieved that she lives in a place where life’s necessities — water, food, and electricity — are readily available.
“I just want to know what safety feels like, even if for just a little,” she said.
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