At the end of a legal battle: The grave of one of the lost Yemeni children will be opened today
Uziel Khoury's grave will be reopened after the court rejected the state's claims that its opening should be postponed for another month due to moisture in the ground.
The purpose of opening the grave, which was revealed in Walla !, is to allow the remains of the body to be removed for identification, including taking a DNA sample for testing family ties.
Meirav Cohen
23/05/2022
Monday, 23 May 2022, 07:00
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Graves of Yemeni children in the Sgula cemetery (Photo: Reuven Castro)
The grave of minor Uziel Khoury who is suspected of being one of the children of the lost children of Yemen, the Balkans and the East will be opened today (Monday).
This, at the end of a five-year legal battle, and after the court rejected the state's claims that the opening of the tomb should be postponed for another month due to soil moisture, and ordered the tomb to be opened on a pre-determined date.
The purpose of opening the grave is to allow the remains of the body to be removed for identification, including taking a DNA sample to perform a family relationship test with the family at the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Abu Kabir.
The Ministry of Health stated that "out of a desire to investigate the truth and remove the families' concerns about the identity of their loved ones. The Ministry of Health at the time supported the enactment of the law and undertook to be trusted and responsible for the implementation of this law."
More on Walla!
State for the first time: A suspicious grave of a baby from the abduction of Yemeni children will be opened for official investigation next week
To the full article
Demonstration to investigate Yemeni children's case (Photo: Flash 90, Tomer Neuberg)
More on Walla!
Due to soil moisture: The opening of the tomb of a baby from the Yemenite children's affair will be postponed for a month
Last week it was announced that some 65 years after evidence of the disappearance of Yemeni and Balkan children began to pile up, the grave of one of the suspected children would be opened for the first time, and the body would be brought for investigation at the Abu Kabir Institute of Forensic Medicine.
The decision came after a petition by five families to the court to open the tomb.
Following the petition, the judges sought the state's response.
The state gave its consent on the condition that the investigation be conducted at the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Abu Kabir, so that it will be conducted in an orderly manner and not privately.
The families agreed, provided that during the interrogation, there would also be an interrogator on their behalf.
The baby whose grave will be opened is Khoury, whose family immigrated from Tunisia in 1948.
In 1952, Uziel and his brother were born, and when he was about a year old, Uziel fell ill, was taken by the welfare services, transferred to a hospital and soon after, the family received word that he had passed away.
He is buried in the Sgula Cemetery in Petah Tikva.
Three committees were set up to examine the affair
Over the years, three commissions of inquiry have been established to examine the affair.
The committees found that out of 1,053 cases that examined 979 children who died, 69 were defined as "unknown" - cases in which no evidence was found of the children's current location, and five were identified as adopted.
At the end of 2016, the State Archives published hundreds of thousands of documents dealing with the affair, including the investigation materials from the committees.
The site has uploaded files containing 210,000 documents, in which you can browse and see what happened to the children, such as the cause of death and where they were buried.
According to the findings, there is no evidence of institutionalized abduction of Yemeni, Eastern and Balkan children.
About a year ago, the previous government, about a month before the election, approved a draft resolution to provide compensation to families affected by the affair.
The approved outline regulated monetary compensation for the affected families in the amount of NIS 162 million.
NIS 150,000 will be transferred to family members who have not been informed of their child's death in real time, including the circumstances of the death, an undiscovered burial site, or whose burial site was found with considerable delay.
In the event that the last committee's conclusion was that it is not known what happened to the child, his family members will receive compensation of NIS 200,000.
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Yemeni children
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