The Supreme Court ordered the Attorney General to allow the exhume a grave belonging to Yemenite newborn Uziel Khoury in the Petah Tikva cemetery.
Reshet Bet reported that researchers will examine whether the baby was actually buried at the cemetery approximately 70 years ago.
The ruling follows decades of speculation about a government plot to abduct Yemenite children, allowing parents of Ashkenazi descent who had lost family members in the Holocaust to raise these children as their own.
n February, 2018, a new law allowing families of Yemenite children who disappeared between the years 1948 and 1970 to obtain a court-ordered exhumation of their graves for genetic testing.
Since the 1950s, more than 1,000 Israeli families have alleged their children were systematically kidnapped from Israeli hospitals and given to Ashkenazi families for adoption in Israel and abroad. The claims of the families, mostly immigrants from Yemen, were generally dismissed by authorities as "baseless conspiracy theories."
The law was to remain in effect for the coming two years. Once an exhumation was approved, the state would cover the costs of the project. At the time, funds were allocated to open at least 300 graves and it was reported that "in many cases, the family does not know where their child’s grave is located, or the grave that has been identified has several bodies buried in it."
The law was proposed by Likud Party lawmaker Nurit Koren, the daughter of Yemenite immigrants whose cousin was among the children who disappeared.
Three government-appointed committees have looked into the Yemenite children affair, and each concluded that the majority of the children died in the hospital and were buried without the families being informed. Scholars have reached similar conclusions.
The law comes more than a year after Israel posted an online database featuring some 200,000 pages of declassified documents about the controversial Yemenite children affair.
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