For the first time… Israel opens the grave of a “Yemeni child” to reveal the truth

Today, Monday morning, the Israeli Ministry of Health opened for the first time the grave of a child whose parents immigrated from Yemen nearly 70 years ago, and social welfare services transferred him to the hospital shortly before informing his family of his death and his burial place.
On Sunday, the Israeli Family Court ruled that despite the Health Ministry’s opinion that the soil was wet and muddy and that it might harm the DNA sampling process, the opening of the tomb would go ahead as planned.
The Ministry of Health began taking a DNA sample, a procedure that may take hours, after which the material will be submitted for examination to the Forensic Medicine Institute, according to the Hebrew newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth.
There is talk about the first operation to open the grave of a Yemeni child, within the issue that preoccupied Israeli public opinion for decades before it erupted recently.
According to the authorities, the child Uziel Khoury died at the age of one year and two months in 1953 and was buried in the cemetery located in the city of Petah Tikva in central Israel, but his family suspects that he was not buried there, but rather disappeared in the context of the case.
For many years, controversy erupted over the file of the disappearance of 650 Yemeni children, who came with their Jewish families as immigrants from Yemen during the first years of the establishment of Israel, and the official authorities claimed that they died as a result of diseases, while their relatives say that they were kidnapped, including from hospitals, and sold to families of Western Jews. (Ashkenazi).
The aim of opening the grave of a child who died about 69 years ago, is to verify whether the same child who was born in 1952 and according to the authorities died one year and two months later – is the child buried there.
Khoury’s family immigrated to Israel in 1948. Uziel and his brother were born four years later, and when he was about a year old, the Yemeni child fell ill, and was transferred by the Social Welfare Services to the hospital, and soon after the family received the news of his death.
The State Commission of Inquiry into the “disappearance of Yemen’s children” decided that Uziel died and was buried in a cemetery in the city of Petah Tikva.
In 2016, former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “The issue of Yemeni children is an open wound that continues to bleed in many families who do not know what happened to the children, and the children who have disappeared are searching for the truth.”