Behind the Veil of Secrecy: The Israeli Skin Bank and Controversies Surrounding Organ Harvesting

In a country like Israel, the army always seeks to possess the latest technologies, especially for treating injuries among its soldiers, including skin injuries. 

Based on this, the idea of establishing the "Israeli Skin Bank" emerged after the 1973 war to treat soldiers who were burned during battles. 

The establishment of the bank was delayed for 12 years due to the need for a ruling from rabbis allowing it, especially since, in the Jewish religion, organ donation is prohibited. 

In 1985, the rabbis issued a ruling allowing skin donation or obtaining skin from another person.

Let's first see what the bank is. 

According to Israeli medical sources, the bank specializes in treating burns. It includes various and diverse samples of skin from different races and colors. 

Despite this place's extraordinary secrecy, the Israeli media has revealed information about it multiple times.

If Israelis are not very keen on donating, how did they end up with the world's largest skin bank? 

The head of the Israeli Forensic Institute, which includes the Forensic Medicine and Anatomy Unit, also admitted to harvesting organs from the bodies of Palestinians in the 1990s without obtaining permission from their families. 

Palestinians have tried a lot to hold Israel accountable for these violations, especially as the Hebrew state still holds more than 373 bodies of Palestinian martyrs who died during their capture by Israeli forces over the years.

These bodies, according to the National Campaign for their Recovery, are distributed between 117 bodies held by Israel in its refrigerators since 2015, in addition to 256 bodies in numbered graves. 

These graves are mass graves surrounded by complete secrecy, and the bodies are buried with a code that consists of a number.
 
This number corresponds to a file held by Israeli authorities containing information about the buried person. It is unclear what has happened to these bodies and what has been extracted from them.

Today, the discussion about the Skin Bank has resurfaced because negotiations on the prisoner file include both the living and the bodies, which have witnessed the most challenging negotiations.