Knesset advances bill to exhume Yemenite children allegedly kidnapped

The Knesset passes the first reading of a bill allowing for Israeli-Yemenite families to exhume the bodies of minors they claim to be their own children who were kidnapped by the State of Israel in the 1950’s.

Since the 50s, more than 1,000 families — mostly immigrants from Yemen, but also dozens from the Balkans, North Africa and other Middle Eastern countries — have alleged their children were systematically kidnapped from Israeli hospitals and put up for adoption, sometimes abroad.

Disputed by scholars and seemingly refuted by three state commissions that examined the affair and concluded most of the children had died, the case has kept resurfacing, not least because most of the families were not given their children’s bodies or informed of their burial places.

Last year the state archives declassified 400,000 documents on the affair in December 2016, but the long-simmering controversy is far from being resolved, as the families have rejected the findings of successive Knesset official commissions of inquiry, and advocacy groups representing the families continue to step up pressure for further probes.

Likud MK Norit Koren, who proposed the bill, says it will “bring hope and comfort to the families of those who still don’t know where they children went.”