Did Israel conduct illegal ‘medical experiments’ on missing Yemeni children?

A committee in Israel on the disappearance of Yemeni children met last week after Israeli media released reports exposing testimonies of doctors who performed unauthorized medical tests on children who went missing shortly after the creation of Israel.

The allegations - based on 20-year-old testimonies by Israeli medical professionals - were presented on Wednesday to the Knesset Special Committee on the Disappearance of Children from Yemen, the East and the Balkans.

The documents were gathered in 1996-1997 by a Knesset-appointed investigative commission tasked with probing the disappearance of over 1,000 children. The documents said that experiments were conducted on the new immigrants from Yemen and whose fates were unknown to their families.

They also revealed that children who died were autopsied without the consent of their parents.

“In the very place they should have been protected, the children disappeared,” Committee Chairwoman Nurit Koren said.

“Some of the children disappeared and their parents never received a death certificate, they were informed only that their children had died.” Koren revealed. “Although they asked to see the bodies, they got nothing and could not hold funerals.

Photographs of children that seemed to attest to medical experiments were also shown at the committee. In one picture, first published by daily newspaper Israel Hayom, three naked children are seen with scribbles marking the location of their internal organs. One of which is seen to have the word “spleen” written in marker over the child’s organs in Hebrew.

“It is increasingly apparent that the bodies of the children were used for research,” Koren revealed.