The AJ+ series Direct From investigates the connection between bodies donated to US universities and training programmes for Israeli military teams.

Los Angeles, California – Medical case manager Miriam Volpin was at work in Nevada when she received a disturbing message from a student journalist at the University of Southern California (USC).

That student, Jennifer Nehrer, was part of a team investigating allegations that bodies donated to the school for education and scientific research were being sold to the United States Armed Forces. Some may even have ended up in the hands of Israeli military surgeons.

“I just got sick to my stomach,” Volpin told Al Jazeera.

Her 101-year-old mother, Jeanette, had died in 2021. A former flight nurse who served in World War II, Jeanette had arranged to donate her body to USC.

Volpin now fears her mother's body was among those used to train surgical teams for conflicts like Israel's genocidal war on Gaza.

The AJ+ documentary series Direct From caught up with Volpin and other family members who wonder whether the remains of their loved ones were used to provide training for military personnel.

Direct From also met with the student journalists who broke the story in 2025, to take their investigation further.

Their reporting revealed that USC was one of two schools in southern California that provided cadavers to the US Navy for Israeli surgical teams.

Records show that, since 2018, USC has supplied at least 89 fresh cadavers as part of agreements involving training for both the US Navy and Israeli military personnel.

Public information about the Israeli training is limited. But a 2020 medical paper written by USC and US Navy instructors offers a rare glimpse inside the process.

The paper describes a four-day “combat trauma surgery skills course” offered to “forward surgical teams” in the Israeli military — units that operate close to the front lines.

During the training, the donated bodies were “reanimated” using a method called perfusion.

That process involves pumping fake blood through the body to make the cadavers as lifelike as possible, mimicking the active bleeding of wounded soldiers on the battlefield.

The paper details participants' training on simulated combat injuries, including gunshot wounds to the chest and legs, and blasts to the face and torso from improvised explosive devices (IEDs).

USC did not respond to repeated requests for comment about which injuries were simulated on the cadavers and how.

The US Navy, meanwhile, told AJ+ that the simulated injuries were produced using "surgical" techniques.

“During this training, experienced Trauma Surgeons recreate complex injury patterns with surgical tools to deliver a high-fidelity, hyper-realistic training environment," the US Navy said in a statement.

But several trauma surgeons told AJ+ that using perfused cadavers is typically for highly specialised training. It is not common across most surgical programmes.

While public interest in the military contracts has only recently gained momentum, the specialised training programme appears to have been ongoing for nearly a decade.

Available federal contracts show that USC has sold cadavers to the US Navy for the Israeli military programme since 2018.

But Israeli military medics arrived in Los Angeles to train with USC and the Navy as early as 2013.

In an email exchange with AJ+, USC denied that the surgery skills course was a "military programme", describing it instead as "educational" in nature. The school also said that the Israeli medical personnel were "noncombatants".

But it appears the training programme required more bodies than USC could deliver on its own.

In recent years, the university has turned for help to the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), which has its own longstanding cadaver contracts with the US military.

The student investigation — a collaboration between journalists at both schools — found that the majority of the donor bodies for the training programme had come from UCSD, a public school.

Some 124 bodies had been transferred from UCSD to USC between 2024 and early 2026, according to the students' reporting.

In an email to AJ+, UCSD denied that its cadavers are used in "military training", saying such a term "mischaracterizes the course".

While it is unclear how the training is being applied, AJ+ did review materials from Israeli sources that suggest an increasing need for surgical training connected to Israel's genocidal war on Gaza.

Since 2023, when the war began, a growing number of senior Israeli military doctors and surgeons have embedded with brigades on the front lines in Gaza, according to information AJ+ obtained.

Donors to both universities are not allowed to make requests about how their bodies will be used, and their families cannot obtain that information after the fact.

Adding to the controversy, donor documents reviewed by AJ+ did not indicate that the cadavers would be used to train military personnel, either from the US or Israel.

Dr Mohamad Raad, a USC-affiliated physician, questions whether the donors would have knowingly signed up if they knew their bodies would be used for procedures like perfusion.

“Regardless of whether we think it's gruesome to do that to a dead body, the part that's even more disturbing, honestly, to me is: Did the patient know?” Raad said.

“And by doing these procedures, coordinating with foreign armies, would they have agreed to that?”

For Jennifer Gomez, whose grandmother, Jean McNeil Sargent, donated her body to UCSD in 2012, the answer was an emphatic no.

“I didn't realise that we were having international militaries come here to train on our families’ bodies,” Gomez told Al Jazeera. “Especially militaries that are accused of war crimes and are actively murdering people.”

Gomez's grandmother died before UCSD started supplying cadavers for the Israeli military programme.

Still, Gomez believes donors like her grandmother deserve to know all the possible uses of their bodies before they donate.

"Most people, like my grandma, go into a decision like this thinking they're going to do something better for the world, not thinking like, 'Oh, I'm going to donate my body, and somehow it's going to make some military force more powerful,'" she said.

The revelations about the training programme have even caused some prospective donors to change their minds about participating.

English professor Wendy Smith told AJ+ that she is no longer comfortable donating her body after learning about the student journalists' report.

“I don't want to support genocide and starvation, and I don't want to support Israeli policies even in the smallest way,” Smith told the documentary team in April.

Both she and her husband have revoked their body donations to UCSD.

Research advocates maintain that body donations are still key to helping students learn the fundamentals of medicine.

But family members like Volpin argue that universities owe body donors more transparency than they currently offer.

Volpin told AJ+ she was glad the story was “getting exposed at this level". She called on the universities to do more to make amends.

“I think that they should acknowledge that they have misled people and state how they're going to go forward to protect their own donation programme. I'm sure it’s in shambles because of the lack of trust,” Volpin added.

But would-be donors like Smith say they feel their concerns about the training programme are being dismissed.

After Smith withdrew as a future body donor, she said she received a response from a UCSD representative.

"I understand you have some reservations on being a donor," the representative wrote. "We will not be responding to factually inaccurate reporting by student reporters who have an agenda."

The student journalists, meanwhile, have rejected UCSD's characterisation of their reporting as "agenda" driven.

“The only agenda we’ve ever had was to investigate and report on the truth,” said USC student journalist Sasha Ryu.

One of Ryu's co-authors in the investigation, student journalist Thomas Murphy, told AJ+ that learning about the surgical training programme was upsetting for his interviewees.

“The donor families I’ve spoken with are deeply shaken by the situation,” Murphy said. “What was once a memory of love and pride is now tarnished by the institution’s actions."

Just before AJ+ published its documentary last month, University of California Health — the network that UCSD Health is part of — added new information to its FAQ page on body donations.

The revised page now acknowledges that donated bodies may be "shared" with other institutions and used to train military medical personnel.

“It just seems like they're trying to cover up something, cover their backs if lawsuits are brought,” Gomez, one of the family members, told Al Jazeera.

However, neither of the two universities implicated in the programme had updated their individual FAQ pages.

The US Navy has issued a “notice of intent” to renew contracts for the programme with USC through at least 2029.

Source: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2026/6/2/us-university-sells-dead-bodies-to-navy-for-israeli-military-training?traffic_source=rss