Yemenite Children Affair

[2] The majority of immigrants arriving in Israel during this period were from Yemen, with considerable numbers coming from Iraq, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and the Balkans.

There have been allegations that no death certificates were issued, and that parents did not receive any information from Israeli and Jewish organizations as to what had happened to their infants.

[5] However, Yaacov Lozowick, Chief Archivist at the Israel State Archives, has documented records showing that while the fate of a small fraction of the "missing" children cannot be traced, in the overwhelming majority of cases the children died in hospital, were buried, and the families notified, although these illnesses, deaths, and family notifications were handled with enormous insensitivity.

[7] Conclusions reached by three separate official commissions set up to investigate the issue unanimously found that the majority of the children were buried, having died from diseases.

[7] Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the issue as "an open wound that continues to bleed" for the many families not knowing what happened to the children who disappeared.

[13] The immigrants from Yemen were initially housed in three former British military camps: Rosh HaAyin, Beit Lid (Pardesiya) and Ein Shemer.

[6] The peak of the public outcry on the matter occurred in 1994 when Yemenite Rabbi Uzi Meshulam established an "armed sect" of radical Yemenite Jews in his garden, who barricaded themselves in his home and violently resisted Israeli law enforcement while demanding that the Israeli government establish a State Commission of Inquiry to examine the matter.

[19] The Israeli government led by Yitzhak Shamir established a commission headed by Justice Moshe Shalgi which lasted four years.

Knesset member and chair of the interior committee, Dov Shilansky, who had overseen testimony given said, "I personally believe, in contradiction to the Shalgi report, that there were more than a few cases of kidnapping of Yemenite babies.

[23] In 2001 a seven-year public inquiry commission concluded that the accusations that Yemenite children were kidnapped by the government were not true.

Concerning these unresolved 56 cases, the commission deemed it "possible" that the children were handed over for adoption following decisions made by individual local social workers, but not as part of an official policy.

Prior testimony given under oath during the previous inquiries revealed that many children had died as a consequence of medical negligence.

[26] In 2016 after having re-examined evidence given to a commission of inquiry in the late 1990s, Cabinet Minister Tzachi Hanegbi told Israeli TV: "They took the children and gave them away.

The minister admitted that at least "hundreds" of children were taken without their parent's consent, marking the first time such a public claim had been made by a government official.

[29] On 23 January 2018, after staging a mass demonstration in Petach-Tikvah, Yemenite families of children believed to have been abducted were given permission by the State Attorney's Office to exhume 18 graves said to be those of their missing loved ones.

Their hope is that, by exhuming their bodies for DNA testing, if the graves should prove to be empty or that the genetic findings do not match those of their siblings, it would give undisputed evidence of a cover-up in the disappearance of these children.

[30] On 24 September 2022, the Health Ministry and the National Institute of Forensic Medicine announced that a "full match" was established between the DNA extracted from the remains of a child, Yosef Melamed, and the genetic profile of his family members.

[35] Written by the outgoing deputy director general and two others, it "reveals the involvement of doctors, nurses and caregivers in taking the children and acting as middlemen in their adoptions, sometimes in exchange for money.

The report chronicles racist perceptions at the time of 'backward immigrants' from Middle Eastern and North African countries, using the pretext of it being in the 'best interests of the children' to justify their being taken away from their biological parents.