Palestinians accuse the Israeli army of stealing body parts from its victims.

Donald Boström describes the international transplant scandal — and how he himself became a witness to an assault on a 19-year-old boy.

“I am what you might call a ‘matchmaker,’” said Levy Izhak Rosenbaum of Brooklyn, USA, in a secret recording with an FBI agent he thought was a customer. Ten days later, at the end of July of this year, Rosenbaum was arrested in connection with a large tangle of corruption uncovered in New Jersey: Rabbis and trusted elected officials had for years engaged in money laundering and the illegal organ trade, and now the network was being rolled up like the mob on The Sopranos. Rosenbaum’s matchmaking was not about romance but about buying and selling kidneys from Israel on the black market. According to his own statement, he would buy body parts from the needy people in Israel for $10,000 and sell them to desperate patients in the U.S. for $160,000. The waiting time for a legal kidney transplant is an average of nine years.

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He wrote the piece in reaction to a recently unveiled corruption scandal in New Jersey that allegedly involved the private sale of a kidney from a donor in Israel.

Bostrom stressed that he has no proof that Israeli soldiers were stealing organs, and that the purpose of his opinion article was to call for an investigation into numerous claims in the 1990s that such activity was going on. One of those claims is from the family of Bilal Ahmed Ghanem, a 19-year-old Palestinian man who was shot and killed in 1992, allegedly by Israeli forces, in the West Bank village of Imatin.

“I was present that night, I was a witness,” Bostrom said.

He said Ghanem’s body was taken away and returned several days later by the Israeli military with a cut in his midsection that had been stitched up. Ghanem’s family said they believed that his organs had been removed.

After that incident, at least 20 Palestinian families told Bostrom that they suspected the Israeli military had taken the organs of their sons after they had been killed by Israeli forces, and their bodies taken away — presumably for routine autopsies.

“I was in the West Bank 50 times in the early ’90s when I experienced this,” Bostrom said. “I think it should be further investigated.”

In his op-ed, Bostrom calls on the International Court of Justice — the principal judicial body of the United Nations — to investigate the allegations.

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