Organ-harvesting allegations still posted on UN Web site

Web site claims "Israeli physicians, rabbis and IDF may be involved.”

By TOVAH LAZAROFF
organ donation transplant 224 88 (photo credit: Courtesy of www.linksambulance.co.uk)
organ donation transplant 224 88
(photo credit: Courtesy of www.linksambulance.co.uk)
Allegations that Israel harvests Palestinian organs have not been removed from the UN Human Rights Council Web site, despite a request by the Geneva based non-governmental organization UN Watch that it be taken down.
In a blog posted by UN Watch executive-director Hillel Neuer this week, the group said that it had complained to the UN about the posting more than a month ago, but that to date, nothing had been done about the matter.
It noted that the NGO group, the International Organization for the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination [EAFORD] which had posted the document on the site in a space reserved for NGO submissions, had posted similarly problematic documents in the past.
“Their [Palestinian] human organs, as reported in the press, can be a source of immense wealth through illegal trafficking in the world market,” wrote EAFORD.
“Israeli physicians, Medical Centres, rabbis and the Israeli army may be involved,” it states.
“After Israeli physicians remove organs they think marketable, the soldiers bury the bodies in graves that carry only numbers and no names, or place them in sealed caskets and deliver them under curfew conditions to the families and supervise the digging of the graves and burial,’ states the NGO document.
Neuer noted a 2008 document by the same group, which is also still posted on the UN Human Rights Council site, accused “Jews everywhere” of having “forgotten the terrors of the Holocaust to such an extent as to allow Israel to pursue and inflict one on the Palestinian people.”
Neuer noted that his group had complained about that post as well.
UN Human Rights Council Branch Chief Eric Tistounet wrote a letter toUN Watch at the end of March in which he said that the council was notin a position to edit or censor NGO oral or written statements.
In response Neuer said that his group’s submissions have been edited.
In his blog, he wrote, “We were told to remove the word “regimes” wherewe had referred to the regimes ruling Burma, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Sudanand Zimbabwe.
Second, we were then informed that our reference to “Burma” was notallowed – only the military junta’s adopted name of “Myanmar.”
The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights could not be reached for comment Thursday.