Stealed organs
The same practice has continued and been documented through the current genocide in Gaza.
In October 2024, Gaza authorities announced that 120 bodies had been returned through the International Committee of the Red Cross over three consecutive days.
The director of the government media office, Ismail Thawabta, stated that most arrived in deplorable condition, with evidence of field executions and systematic torture. Some were returned blindfolded and bound, others bearing signs of strangulation.
Crucially, parts of many corpses were missing, including eyes, corneas, and other organs, which Thawabta described as confirmation that the army had stolen human organs while holding the bodies.
At that point, Israel was holding the bodies of 735 Palestinian prisoners, including 67 children.
This was not the first time such findings had reached the United Nations. In November 2015, Palestinian Ambassador Riyad Mansour wrote directly to then-Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, stating that medical examinations of returned bodies found they were missing organs.
Alongside organ removal, Israel has systematically held Palestinian bodies in military cemeteries known as “cemeteries of numbers,” burying Palestinians at depths of less than 50 centimetres, assigning numbers rather than names, and blocking access by both human rights institutions and the families of the deceased.
In 2017, Israeli authorities admitted losing the bodies of Palestinians buried in these sites, with documents relating to their burial reportedly destroyed.
It is into this context that the Ercan Airport incident came.
TRNC authorities are still investigating the case, but have yet to determine where those embryos were going, and why an Israeli-linked courier operation was the chosen method of transport.
But somehow, the missing organs, the destroyed records, the bodies returned without their parts; the trail leads, repeatedly, to the same place.
