Exposed: Medical experiments on missing Yemenite children

The Knesset Special Committee on the Disappearance of Children from Yemen, the East and the Balkans met Wednesday morning, after Israel Hayom published an exclusive report exposing doctors' testimonies that unauthorized medical tests were performed on children who went missing in the early years of the state and whose fates were unknown to their families. The documents also revealed that children who died were autopsied without the consent of their parents.

Committee members were presented with the protocols of previous government committees of inquiry into the missing children, as well as proof that some of the children died after being subjected to experimental medical treatments.

Committee Chairwoman MK Nurit Koren (Likud) said at Wednesday's meeting: "In the very place they should have been protected, the children disappeared. Some of the children disappeared and their parents never received a death certificate; they were informed only that their children had died. Although they asked to see the bodies, they got nothing and could not hold funerals. It is increasingly apparent that the bodies of the children were used for research."

Koren said that one of the protocols from the committee of inquiry showed not only that autopsies had been conducted without the parents' consent and without respect for the dead, but that medical tests had been carried out on live children.

"The team of doctors was condescending to new immigrants and did not acknowledge the basic rights of the patient, or of the parents to give permission for their children to receive certain treatments," Koren said.

"There was a great crime here that was never reported. The committee's conclusions never discussed any experiments or any autopsies. Everything was before them, and it is inconceivable that we will ignore it."

MK Dov Khenin (Joint Arab List) called the evidence "heartbreaking."

"It's horrifying to think about what kind of a reality this could happen in. Sunlight is the best disinfectant in cases like these," Khenin said.

Meir Broda from the Health Ministry's legal bureau said the reports were very serious and must be condemned, but "we are looking at things from the perspective of today, in today's reality, which was not the reality of those days. There was an atmosphere of research. Reports from that time show that 50% of bodies in hospitals were autopsied to determine the cause of death."

The disappearance of hundreds of mostly Yemenite children who arrived in Israel in the early days of the state has been an open wound in Israeli society for years, one that erupts from time to time in pained demonstrations and demands that the truth be revealed.

Three government committees have been appointed over the years to probe the affair: the Bahlul-Minkowski Committee of 1967, the Shalgi Committee of 1988, and the Cohen-Kedmi state commission of inquiry, which was appointed in 1995 and submitted its report in 2001. All the committees found that no children had been kidnapped, as is frequently alleged, although the Cohen-Kedmi committee pointed out that the dozens of cases in which children supposedly died but for whom no death certificates were issued indicated that they could have been put up for adoption without their families' knowledge or consent.

Israel Hayom has obtained protocols that record testimonies of experiments that were conducted on the children without their parents' knowledge or consent; of experimental treatment that caused the deaths of at least four children; of the abduction of one girl from the Rambam Hospital in Haifa; and of one member of the Rambam medical staff adopting a baby girl.

Israel Hayom has also obtained pictures that have never been published that appear to document some of the medical experiments conducted on the children. In what appears to be an attempt to teach anatomy, one picture shows the word "spleen" written on a naked child's abdomen.

All of this material was presented in Wednesday's Knesset Committee meeting.

One page of the findings of the investigative committee describes how doctors carried out an experimental treatment on four undernourished babies in which they injected dry protein into the babies' veins, a treatment that killed them.

The protocol records attorney Drora Nahmani-Roth attempting to jog the memory of Dr. George Mendel, the former head of the children's hospital at Rosh Haayin in central Israel.

When pressed, Mendel said, "I remember one or two cases in which Dr. Matot gave instructions to give an injection of dry protein that we would separate. Serum, dry plasma … and the results were not good."

The protocol includes a letter from Dr. Kalman Jacob Mann, deputy medical director of the hospital, to Mendel, dated Nov. 21, 1949, saying: "I visited our hospital in Rosh Haayin, and found that that morning four babies who had received active treatment had died. These babies were in more or less balanced condition according to their physio-pathological condition, but after they were injected with various solutions, the balance was upset and they died."

Another piece of evidence describes how a Yemenite girl was adopted at Rambam Hospital, which could confirm long-standing suspicions that Yemenite children who were brought in for medical treatment were taken away from their biological families, who were then informed that their children had died.

Professor Gali Baruch, a staff doctor at Rambam in the years in question, testified to the investigative committee: "I knew one doctor in Haifa whose family adopted a Yemenite girl at the Rambam Hospital."

Mendel told the committee about another such case: "After I started working at Rambam, we moved to Kfar Shmaryahu. We rented a little house and one of the neighbors had an adopted daughter who didn't look like them at all. She was dark-skinned and I was reminded I had seen that. ... I don't know too much about them."

In another piece of testimony, Mendel told the committee that he had also conducted medical testing on live Yemenite children in which doctors tried to discover whether they had sickle cell anemia.

"There was a famous guy named Professor Damascus who was a well-known hematologist. He looked at the Yemenites and thought that they must have African blood. He said, why don't we check? Professor Fritz Dreyfuss was responsible [for the testing]. He gave instructions, and we carried them out. Professor Dreyfuss was excited and wrote an article in one of the medical journals, theorizing where the Yemenites had come from and where they had moved around the world, all very nice," Mendel said.

When asked what the testing consisted of, Mendel said, "We took blood and a blood count, etc. One time a doctor came who in London had carried out special testing on hemoglobin, Dr. Lyman, and found that everything was incorrect. Everything collapsed, and we had already told the Yemenites they had African blood!"

Mendel said there "was no need" to ask the children's parents for permission to conduct any of the testing.

"They took children who died for various reasons and checked their veins, checked their hearts," he said.

When Nahmani-Roth asked him whether the unapproved autopsies had caused problems with the parents who wanted to see their children's bodies, Mendel replied, "I don't think so, since after the autopsies we'd fix up the baby, so they [the parents] could see its face, so it looked undamaged ... but it was completely legal. There were no problems."

The lawyer shot back: "Not legally, but morally, and out of a sense of the parents' feelings. Isn't it possible that consistently, you would conduct autopsies on children and then not show the bodies to their parents-"

Mendel also told the committee that all the testing had been meticulously documented, but that he had heard rumors that "someone destroyed them [the records] seven years later."

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