The bodies that Americans donated to science may have ended up on steel tables, pumped with artificial blood, so Israeli military surgeons could rehearse battlefield wounds.
A University of Southern California programme sold donated cadavers to the US Navy for a combat surgery course attended by Israeli forward surgical teams, according to student journalists, federal contract records, and a peer-reviewed 2020 medical paper.
An Al Jazeera documentary published on 2 June 2026 carried the allegations to a global audience and reignited anger among grieving families who say nobody warned them. USC and the University of California, San Diego both reject the claim that they operated a 'military' programme.
How Donated Cadavers Reached a Navy Combat Surgery Course
The story began with student reporters at USC's Annenberg Media, who traced the trade through public contracts in an October 2025 investigation. Since 2017, the US Navy has paid USC more than £639,000 ($860,000) for at least 89 cadavers, and 32 of those bodies were used for an Israeli military trauma course at Los Angeles General Medical Center, Fox 11 Los Angeles reported.
The training itself is not new. The Navy Trauma Training Center at the hospital dates to 2002, and Israeli surgical teams began rotating through as early as 2013, with contracts naming Israeli personnel from 2017 onward.
A four-day 'combat trauma surgery skills course' for 'forward surgical teams' is set out in a 2020 paper co-written by Navy and USC Keck instructors and indexed on the National Library of Medicine's database.
The 'Reanimation' of the Dead and the Problem of Consent
The 2020 paper describes a technique that has unsettled many readers. Instructors used a perfused fresh human cadaver model, pumping fluid through the vascular system so the dead tissue would bleed like a living casualty. Trainees practised on gunshot wounds to the chest and legs, alongside blast injuries to the face and torso caused by improvised explosive devices.
“It’s horrifying.”
— AJ+ (@ajplus) May 30, 2026
This doctor is speaking out after it was revealed that bodies donated for science to his university were used to train Israeli military medics in Los Angeles. pic.twitter.com/9AESqObTcf
Several trauma surgeons told Al Jazeera that perfused cadavers are reserved for highly specialised work and seldom appear in ordinary courses. The consent question cuts deeper still. Donors hand over their bodies for medical training and research, yet the programmes do not tell families that a foreign army might train on the remains, and the donor paperwork reviewed by reporters made no mention of it.
Israeli military surgeons have been training on corpses donated by US citizens without the consent of the deceased.
— Novara Media (@novaramedia) June 3, 2026
The University of Southern California (USC) sells donated bodies to the US Navy and since 2018 it has provided at least 32 cadavers to an Israeli military surgical… pic.twitter.com/JkD3FYGgvw
Much of the supply traces to a second campus. The student investigation found that the majority of the donor bodies came from UCSD, a public university, with roughly 124 transferred to USC between 2024 and early 2026, according to the Al Jazeera documentary. Dr Mohamad Raad, a USC-affiliated physician, asked whether donors would ever have agreed had they known.
Universities Push Back as Donor Families Recoil
Both schools dispute the framing. USC's Keck School of Medicine calls the course educational and describes the Israeli trainees as 'non-combatant surgeons, nurses and anesthesiologists,' a small share of the laboratory's annual work, Annenberg Media reported. UCSD told one withdrawing donor that it would not respond to what it called inaccurate reporting by 'student reporters who have an agenda.' The Navy, for its part, said its trauma surgeons recreate complex injury patterns to deliver what it called a 'hyper-realistic training environment.'
The families are not soothed. Miriam Volpin, whose 101-year-old mother and wartime flight nurse Jeanette had pledged her body to USC, said the revelations left her 'sick to my stomach.' Jennifer Gomez, whose grandmother donated to UCSD, recoiled at the thought of foreign militaries training on her family's body. English professor Wendy Smith and her husband revoked their own donations after watching the report.
The Israeli teams trained for front-line surgery as Israel waged a war in Gaza that is the subject of genocide proceedings against it at the International Court of Justice. University of California Health quietly revised a donation FAQ to admit that bodies may be shared and used to train military medics, while the Navy has signalled it will renew the USC contract through at least 2029.
Families who gave their dead to heal the living are left wondering whether they helped prepare a battlefield instead.
