An Israeli-led organ trafficking ring operating in Turkey has been dismantled, police say, after investigators placed into custody 11 suspects who entered the country under the auspices of so-called “health tourism.”
- Officers with the Provincial Directorate of Security’s Anti-Smuggling and Border Gates department in the Turkish city of Adana arrested 11 individuals—five Israelis and two Syrians—for allegedly trafficking in human organs.
- Authorities claim the men entered Adana from Israel one month ago by plane and had in possession numerous fake passports as well as $65,000 in Turkish and Israeli currency.
- Authorities state that the two Syrian nationals, aged 20 and 21, agreed to sell their kidneys to the Israeli men, which led to arrests and police raids on their residences in Turkey on May 5th.
The Context: Despite the ghastly revelations, May 5th, 2024, is currently being observed by mainstream politicians the world over as international “holocaust remembrance day,” also known as “Yom Ha Shoah” in Hebrew.
The big picture: Israel’s ties to horrific allegations of organ and human trafficking have existed for years.
- In 2011, the Jewish state of Israel was once referred to as a “sprawling global black market in organs where brokers use deception, violence, and coercion to buy kidneys from impoverished people, mainly in underdeveloped countries, and then sell them to critically ill patients in more-affluent nations.”
- Israel’s organ trafficking network is said to span from former Soviet Republics to places like Brazil, the Philippines, South Africa, and elsewhere. Criminal gangs who obtain these organs then traffick them to Israeli residents.
- In 2009, Swedish journalists implicated the Israeli Defense Forces in a criminal scheme involving the kidnapping and murder of Palestinians to obtain their internal organs.
In the headlines: Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza, which has spurned accusations of genocide against the Palestinian people, has only narrowed the distance between the Jewish state of Israel and organ trafficking claims.
- On January 30th, reports alleged that members of the IDF returned the corpses of 100 Palestinian civilians it had “stolen” from Gazan hospitals, with many of them missing their internal organs.
- A statement by the Palestinian news agency described the acts as “awful crimes” committed by the Israeli occupation.
- In February, it was announced that an Israeli science lab successfully created “artificial testicles” in a disturbing science experiment believed to help solve issues with human fertility.