A senior official of one of the Belgium’s most prominent trade unions has accused Israel of “kidnapping and murdering Palestinian children for their organs.”

The alternative media De Wereld Morgen site published the piece by Robrecht Vanderbeeken, the cultural secretary of the ACOD trade union and a researcher at Ghent University, Belgian Jewish website Joods Actueel reported.

Mr Vanderbeeken wrote that "Gaza has been starved and poisoned by a land, sea and air blockade for more than 10 years, children have been kidnapped and murdered for their organs.”

De Wereld Morgen subsequently issued what it called a “correction” to Mr Vanderbeeken’s article, claiming that while Israel kidnaps and murders Palestinian children and uses organs belonging to Palestinians it kills, the media site had decided “not to suggest a causality between the kidnapping and murder of children by the Israeli occupation army and the removal of organs for transplants.”

The charge that Israel harvests organs from Palestinians first appeared in Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet in 2009.

It was widely condemned as antisemitic and described by the Israeli government as a modern-day blood libel.

Professor Klaas Smelik, former professor of Hebrew and Jewish studies at Ghent University, told Joods Actueel: “the old antisemitic propaganda of Jews poisoning wells and kidnapping children to use their blood for dark rituals has resurfaced in the unproven claims about poisoning the population of the Gaza Strip and kidnapping children to use organs for transplantation.”