Yehuda Hiss

Yehuda Hiss (; born 1946) is a retired Israeli pathologist. He served as the Chief Pathologist at the Abu Kabir Institute of Forensic Medicine between 1988 and possibly as late as 2005. Hiss has also served as part of the faculty for the Terrorism and Medicine Program at the Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT) at IDC Herzliya and in the Department of Pathology for the Sackler Faculty of Medicine at Tel Aviv University.

As director of the Institute at Abu Kabir, the only place in Israel authorized to conduct autopsies in cases of unnatural death, Hiss conducted the autopsies of and authored the pathology reports for notable figures, including Yitzhak Rabin and Rachel Corrie, among others. His position as director was a subject of controversy.

Medical career Hiss became the director and chief pathologist at Abu Kabir in 1988. As director of the institute, Hiss was involved with high-profile cases. Hiss performed the autopsy on Yitzhak Rabin after his 1995 assassination; his report was challenged in March 1999 by a group of Israeli academics. In May 2003, he confirmed the identification of the body that washed ashore the beaches of Tel Aviv to be that of Omar Sharif, the accomplice of Asif Hanif, who carried out the Mike's Place suicide bombing the month previous. Hiss told Haaretz that Sharif's DNA was matched to samples provided by two British detectives and the cause of death was determined to be drowning. He also performed the autopsy on Rachel Corrie, an American woman killed by an Israeli bulldozer while attempting to protect a Palestinian home from being demolished.

A piece featuring Hiss that appeared in The New York Times in February 2004 noted Hiss played a "unique role" in the response network that Israel had to developed to deal with the more than 100 suicide bombings it had experienced over the three years previous. All the dead from such attacks are brought to the Forensic Institute, and Hiss had been present to attend to, "the dismembered victims and shattered victims," in all but one attack.

Controversy According to Rebecca Dube in the Forward, allegations that Hiss and his lab were taking organs from corpses without permission and using them for research or selling them to medical schools were substantiated by the Israeli government. After an autopsy overseen by Hiss, the body was returned to his family; a second autopsy performed by pathologists at the University of Glasgow found that the heart and a small bone at the base of his tongue were missing.

Israel's Ministry of Health convened a committee to investigate the claims which found that Hiss had been involved for years in the sale of illegally removed body parts to medical schools.

Hiss ceased being the director of the institute in 2005 when allegations of a trade in organs resurfaced.

Jonathan Cook writing in Al-Ahram Weekly in 2009 recalls Hiss' history in connection with the Aftonbladet allegations.

Published works (1977), The Journal of Pathology (124: 2) Progressive spastic paraparesis, vitiligo, premature graying, and distinct facial appearance: A new genetic syndrome in 3 sibs (1981), American Journal of Medical Genetics (9:4) Sarcoidosis and Hashimoto's Thyroiditis - A Chance Occurrence? (1985), Respiration: International Journal of Thoracic Medicine (48:2) Does Prolonged Use of Diphenylhydantoin Predispose to Pulmonary Sarcoidosis? (1986), European Neurology (25:4) Hemoptysis as the presenting manifestation of sarcoidosis (June 1987), Chest (91:931b-931) The Feasibility of In Vivo Resection on the Left Lobe of the Liver and Its Use for Transplanation (July 1989), Transplantation (48:1) (June 1995), Experimental and Molecular Pathology (62:3) Immunohistochemical Localization of Gonadotropin and Gonadal Steroid Receptors in Human Pineal Glands (1997), The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (82:3) Evidence for the involvement of the hippocampus in the pathophysiology of schizophrenia (September 2000), European Neuropsychopharmacology (10:5) Focal lymphocytic infiltration in aging human palatal salivary glands: a comparative study with labial salivary glands (January 2001), Journal of Oral Pathology & Medicine (30:1) (June 2002), Experimental Gerontology (37:6) (January 2009), The Laryngoscope (104:7)