Additionally the law provides financial reimbursement to living donors for medical expenses due to donation and lost time at work.
The first law defines brain-respiratory death as a situation in which person who has no blood pressure, fails to breathe without external life support systems and has no response from the pupils or any other reflexes is declared dead by two certified doctors.
[6] Israel operates a National Transplant and Organ Donation Center, established in 1993 as an institute of the Ministry of Health.
Since some ultra-religious Jews feel the 2008 law does not properly address halachic questions, Israel's Chief Rabbinate has decided to issue an organ donor card of its own, which allows organ harvesting from the potential donor only if brain death is determined according to the strictest letter of the law - for example by requiring that brain death be confirmed using electronic equipment rather than just the determination of a physician.
[10] The percentage of people who hold an organ donation card in Israel is only 14 percent;[11] in Western countries the rate is 30-40%.
As a result, there are about 1,000 Israelis currently on the "waiting list" for organs, and it is estimated that roughly 10% of them die annually, due to a lack of donations.
[12] The Jewish weekly newspaper The Forward reported in the wake of this scandal that an Organ Trafficking Prohibition Act of 2009, sponsored by Democratic Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, has yet to be officially introduced in the U.S., but that its proposed language cites Israel as a model of a country that has enacted a law providing benefits for organ donors.
[14] As a result of all the abuses of the illegal market in human organs, there is a growing movement of activists in Israel and in America to legalize a Government-regulated program to offer financial incentives to people for living kidney donations and to families for deceased donations from brain-stem dead donors.
[16] However the author of the article, Donald Boström, spoke to Israel Radio on 19 August 2009 and said he was worried by the allegations he reported: "It concerns me, to the extent that I want it to be investigated, that's true.
"[17] In December an interview was broadcast on Israeli television during which Israel's chief pathologist, Dr. Yehuda Hiss, discussed the harvesting of organs in the 1990s at the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute.