Israel has charged five of its citizens, including a retired army general, with operating a nationwide organ trafficking ring that ensnared dozens of potential victims. The charges include human trafficking for the purpose of organ harvesting and money laundering.

The indictment says that the ring exploited the desperate condition of sick people and called it a "form of modern slavery." The traffickers allegedly offered up to $100,000 per kidney but in at least two cases did not pay the donors, who were sought through advertisements and then flown from Israel to Europe, South America or Southeast Asia, where the organs were extracted in illegal procedures. Israeli law bans organ sales ...

The investigation by Uri Blau, who has been in hiding since December to avoid arrest, concerned Israeli preparations for the impending assault on Gaza, known as Operation Cast Lead.

In a highly unusual move, according to reports in the Israeli media, the army ordered the Haaretz newspaper to destroy all copies of an edition that included Blau’s investigation after it had already gone to press and been passed by the military censor. The article was never republished.

Blau has gone underground in London after the Shin Bet, Israel’s secret police, demanded he return to Israel to hand back hundreds of classified documents they claim are in his possession and to reveal his sources. He published several additional reports for Haaretz in 2008 and 2009 that severely embarrassed senior military commanders by showing they had issued orders that intentionally violated court rulings, including to execute Palestinians who could be safely apprehended.

Haneen Zoubi, an MP who previously headed an Israeli media-monitoring organization, said it was “outrageous” that the suppressed report was still secret so long after the Gaza attack. She is to table a parliamentary question to Ehud Barak, the defense minister, today demanding to know why the army suppressed the article and what is preventing its publication now. Barak must respond within 21 days.

She said publication of the article was important both because Israel had been widely criticized for killing many hundreds of civilians in its three-week assault on Gaza, and because subsequent reports suggested that Israeli commanders sought legal advice months before the operation to manipulate the accepted definitions of international law to make it easier to target civilians.

“There must be at least a strong suspicion that Mr Blau’s article contains vital information, based on military documentation, warning of Israeli army intentions to commit war crimes,” she said in an interview. “If so, then there is a public duty on Haaretz to publish the article. If not, then there is no reason for the minister to prevent publication after all this time.”

Zoubi’s call yesterday followed mounting public criticism of Haaretz for supporting Blau by advising him to stay in hiding and continuing to pay his salary. In chat forums and talkback columns, the reporter has been widely denounced as a traitor. Several MPs have called for Haaretz to be closed down or boycotted. ....

I know something about how Israel's security forces treat journalists who they believe to be hostile.

In January I was held for over a week in a dingy detention center at Israel's Ben Gurion airport before being deported.

Before I was detained I was questioned by a security officer about news articles I had authored in my two and a half years working in the West Bank for the Palestinian news agency Ma'an.

I was interrogated in a spare, windowless office in the airport. At one point the officer, a woman with piercing blue eyes who never identified herself, paged through the contacts on my cell phones, telling me to give information about sources, colleagues, and friends who's numbers I'd stored. I refused.

She set the phones down on her desk, and without thinking I reached for them. She stopped me. "In this office, you have no rights," she said. I didn't see the phones, like the rest of my possessions, until I was released eight days later.

So it is natural that I have been following and investigating for weeks the case of Anat Kam, the Israeli journalist and former soldier who has been under secret house arrest for months for leaking military documents, and Uri Blau, the reporter who used the papers to expose an assassination program that violated Israel's own laws.

Like me, Blau, a reporter for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, also finds himself unable to return to Israel.

I am not Israeli, and Blau's situation is different and in important ways more severe than my case. But I believe I can empathize, on some basic level, with the Kafkaesque turn his life has taken.

Blau is in hiding in London, fearing arrest if he returns to his home country. He exposed documents that showed that the military violated a high court order to authorize the killing of Islamic Jihad leaders, even if innocents were also killed.

Blau wrote an article in Friday's newspaper saying he went on vacation in December not knowing the extent to which he was under surveillance: "When I left Israel I had no reason to believe our planned trip would suddenly turn into a spy movie whose end is not clear."

"I certainly didn't think I'd have to stay in London and wouldn't be able to return to Tel Aviv as a journalist and a free man, only because I published reports that were not convenient to the establishment." ...