Government votes to declassify Yemenite children archives

The government voted today to declassify some 400,000 documents relating to allegations that hundreds of Yemenite children were kidnapped from Israeli hospitals in the 1950s and handed over to wealthy families for adoption.

Since the 1950s, over 1,000 families — mostly Yemenite, but also dozens from the Balkans, North Africa and other Middle Eastern countries — have made these allegations.

Sunday’s decision means that those testimonies, which, along with several other collections of documents, were to be sealed in the state archives until 2071, will be freed up and even posted on the internet.

Releasing the documents will put an “end to this unbearable situation, unjustified confidentiality, that has been imposed for seventy years on these materials,” says Minister-without-portfolio Tzachi Hanegbi, who was appointed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to oversee a probe into whether the government should declassify documents.

“This “will put an end to the suspicion, skepticism and mistrust toward the state agencies by the families,” Hanegbi says.

Over the past several decades the government has appointed three investigative committees to probe the case, with all concluding the majority of children died in the hospital and were simply buried without the families’ being informed or involved.

— Raoul Wootliff