Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, second from right, attends a cabinet meeting in Jerusalem. Israel's Health Ministry says the guidelines at the time organs were taken illegally ‘were not clear’. Photo / AP EXPAND

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, second from right, attends a cabinet meeting in Jerusalem. Israel's Health Ministry says the guidelines at the time organs were taken illegally ‘were not clear’. Photo / AP

JERUSALEM - The former head of Israel's Abu Kabir forensic institute has admitted that in the 1990s, the institute's forensic pathologists harvested organs from dead bodies, including Palestinians, without the permission of their families.

The issue emerged with publication of an interview with the then-head of Abu Kabir forensic institute, Dr Jehuda Hiss.

The interview was conducted in 2000 by an American academic, who released it because of a huge controversy last summer over an allegation by a Swedish newspaper that Israel was killing Palestinians in order to harvest their organs.

Israel has denied the charge.

Parts of the interview were broadcast on Israel's Channel 2 TV over the weekend.

In it, Hiss said, "We started to harvest corneas... Whatever was done was highly informal. No permission was asked from the family".

The Channel 2 report said that in the 1990s, forensic specialists at Abu Kabir harvested skin, corneas, heart valves and bones from the bodies of Israeli soldiers, Israeli citizens, Palestinians and foreign workers, often without permission from relatives.

In a response to the TV report, the Israeli military confirmed that the practice took place.

"This activity ended a decade ago and does not happen any longer," the military said in a statement quoted by Channel 2.

In the interview, Hiss described how his doctors would mask the removal of corneas from bodies.

"We'd glue the eyelid shut," he said. "We wouldn't take corneas from families we knew would open the eyelids."

Many of the details in the interview first came to light in 2004, when Hiss was dismissed as head of the forensic institute because of irregularities over use of organs there.

Israel's attorney general dropped criminal charges against him, and Hiss still works as chief pathologist at the institute. He had no comment on the TV report.

Hiss became director of the institute in 1988.

He said in the interview that the practice of harvesting organs without permission began in the "early 1990s".

However, he also said that military surgeons removed a thin layer of skin from bodies as early as 1987 to treat burn victims.