Jeremy Corbyn has been accused of “spreading a wild blood libel” after making “baseless” claims the IDF had delivered boxes containing the bodies of dead Palestinians with their “organs removed” to a Gaza hospital.
Speaking in a video circulating on social media, the former Labour Party leader states that he was contacted by the director of Gaza City’s al-Shifa hospital. Relaying what he claims the director told him, Corbyn says: “He said there had been a delivery to the hospital by the IDF, a large number of boxes, 60 or 70 boxes. And after the IDF had gone off, they opened the boxes and each one contained the skull of a Palestinian who had been killed.”
He continued: “They were also delivered...bodies of dead women in Gaza that had been opened and some of the organs removed. I mean, it's hard to describe this. That is happening to the people of Palestine”.
The Islington North MP went on to describe cause of the Palestinian people as “the cause of our age”, in the way opposition to the Vietnam War and opposition to fascism during the Spanish Civil War were the defining causes of previous generations.
Everyone needs to listen to this.
— Daniel Lambert (@dlLambo) February 23, 2026
Jeremy Corbyn talks about a message from the director of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza detailing a delivery of boxes to the hospital by the IDF.
What they contained is simply demonic - it's beyond comprehension.
pic.twitter.com/I4KDzgpD6w
The footage came from a Zoom call that took place last week for “The Many”, a slate of candidates backed by Corbyn in internal elections for his current party, named Your Party, the JC understands.
His comments drew intense criticism – and denials – from both the IDF and the UK’s Israeli embassy.
“What happened to fact checking before spreading a wild blood libel?”, asked the IDF’s international spokesman Nadav Shoshani, adding that “Jeremy Corbyn’s claims are completely false” and “baseless”.
Shoshani said: “The IDF operates in accordance with international law and strict internal directives that prohibit such conduct. The return of bodies to Gaza is carried out through international coordination and with the assistance of the Red Cross.”
Alex Gandler, spokesman for Israel’s embassy in London, also firmly rejected the claims Corbyn made in the clip.
In a post on X, he accused Corbyn of “reheating tired conspiracies and dressing them up as ‘brave truth-telling’”, adding: “We completely reject all of his claims.”
Gandler continued: “Serious public discourse is replaced with insinuation and recycled smears, including tropes and blood libels. This isn’t leadership. It’s a bid for engagement metrics masquerading as principle.
“History remembers statesmen. The algorithm remembers outrage. He’s clearly chosen his audience."
When contacted for comment, Corbyn said that the claims made by the director of the al-Shifa hospital which he shared should be investigated.
He told the JC: "Widespread reports that Palestinian bodies have been returned with missing organs should be investigated by independent international organisations, as part of a much wider investigation into the totality of Israeli war crimes in Gaza. I will continue to call for journalists and ICC [International Criminal Court] investigators to be allowed into Gaza so the world can know the true scale of the horrors that have been committed against the Palestinian people."
Since the start of Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza, there have been accusations that the terror group used the hospital for nefarious purposes.
Last September, the freed British-Israeli hostage Emily Damari spoke of how she was taken by her captors to the al-Shifa hospital: “[It was] not the ‘civilian’ hospital that everyone talks about in the news. It was al-Shifa and if terrorists took me to al-Shifa, it means there weren’t civilians in there. As I got to the room, the first thing I saw was a dead body, blood on the floor, and the second thing was 10 or 15 terrorists inside the room, with their guns, and the third thing is that the doctor came to me and said: ‘Hi, I’m Dr Hamas.’”
She continued: “This is al-Shifa Hospital that the IDF continues to come back to, and all the news was talking about it, saying :’How could they go to these civilian places? To hospitals?’ So, this is the reason.’”
The previous September, the IDF said that soldiers had discovered weapons hidden “in the pillows and beds” of patients in the maternity ward of al-Shifa, as well as in the ceilings and walls of the compound.
Last December, the father of a murdered hostage, Noa Marciano – whose body was discovered near the hospital in November 2023 – said that his daughter was murdered by at al-Shifa by a doctor who injected air into her veins, and that the family found out about her death after they were sent a video of her murder via the social media network Telegram.
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