Report: Smugglers Stealing Migrants’ Organs
Egyptian Bedouin smugglers are reportedly killing African migrants who are attempting to infiltrate into Israel for their organs. More precisely, the Bedouins are drugging migrants who cannot pay their high smuggling fees, opening them up, harvesting their organs, and then leaving them to die in the Sinai.
According to The Jerusalem Post, the Al-Arish-based New Generation Foundation for Human Rights and the EveryOne Group from Italy have found corpses missing organs dumped in wells in the Sinai. They have also photographed bodies in the El-Arish morgue with scars consistent with organ removal.
The Jerusalem Post refers to a CNN report quoting a source that said that mobile clinics with advanced equipment come from a private hospital in Cairo and conduct examinations on the migrants to determine which would be the best sources for healthy organs. Then the surgery is performed on the spot in the middle of the desert. The doctors pay $20,000 and up per organ to the Sawarka tribe.
A report released last February by Physicians for Human Rights-Israel stated that 52 percent of African migrants entering Israel were physically abused while in the Sinai. The situation is likely getting worse due to the lawlessness in the region since the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak in February.
“It’s like spare parts for cars,” the Bedouin source callously told CNN as he referred to the alleged brutal and murderous illegal trafficking in human organs.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
