| abstract
| - The article was written by Swedish freelance photojournalist Donald Boström, and was titled "Våra söner plundras på sina organ" ("Our sons are plundered of their organs"). It presented allegations that in the late 1980s and early 1990s, many young men from the West Bank and Gaza Strip had been seized by Israeli forces and their bodies returned to their families with missing organs. The Israeli government and several US congresspersons condemned the article as baseless and incendiary, while noting the history of antisemitism and blood libels against Jews, and asked the Swedish government to denounce it. Stockholm refused, citing freedom of the press and the country's constitution. Swedish ambassador to Israel Elisabet Borsiin Bonnier condemned the article as "shocking and appalling", stating that freedom of the press carries responsibility, but the Swedish government distanced itself from her remarks. Lena Posner, a leader of the Jewish community in Stockholm and the president of the Official Council of Jewish Communities in Sweden explained that "freedom of expression is sacred" to Swedes, as to Israelis and that no one in Sweden "understand how Israel dares to interfere." Italy made a stillborn attempt to defuse the diplomatic situation through a European resolution condemning antisemitism. The Palestinian Authority announced it would establish a commission to investigate the article's claims. The Swedish and Israeli media were highly critical of the article, and all cultural editors of other major Swedish newspapers argued that the article, based on old hearsay and rumors, should never have been published. However, the Swedish Newspaper Publishers' Association and Reporters Without Borders supported Sweden's refusal to condemn it. Meanwhile, family members of Bilal Ghanem, the Palestinian at the center of the article's claims, stated that they had never told Boström that Ghanem's organs had been removed, and could not confirm the allegation. In a follow-up editorial, Aftonbladet editor Jan Helin wrote that he allowed the article "because it raises a few questions", while acknowledging that the paper had no evidence for its claims. In August 2009, Boström said he did not know whether the claims were true or not but that he wanted them investigated; he made similar remarks again at a November conference in Israel. Aftonbladet published an update noting the recent conviction of Yehuda Hiss, Chief Pathologist at Israel's Abu Kabir Institute, and two of his colleagues for improperly taking body tissue from a dead Israeli soldier in 2001. The paper acknowledged that the event did not prove the correctness of the original allegations. In December 2009, a 2000 interview with Hiss was released, in which he had admitted taking organs from other corpses, including from Palestinians, without the families' permission. Israeli health officials confirmed Hiss' confession but stated that such incidents had ended in the 1990s and noted that Hiss had been removed from his post. The report appeared to confirm Palestinians' allegations that Israel returned their relatives bodies with their chests sewn up, having harvested their organs. There was nothing in the interview to substantiate the claim that Israel killed Palestinians for their organs.
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