Medical officials on Wednesday exhumed another body of a baby who is believed to have died in 1948 in Tel Aviv, in the latest effort to determine the fate of a child born to Yemenite immigrants whose family believes he was kidnapped.

The full exhumation of the grave by medical anthropologists was expected to take a number of hours.

The National Center of Forensic Medicine said that only after the body has been examined will it be decided whether eight further graves will be opened in the so-called Yemenite Children Affair.

The grave marked as belonging to Yosef Melamed, who was pronounced dead in the hospital after suffering an illness nearly 75 years ago, was opened on Wednesday morning in the Nahalat Yitzhak cemetery, close to Tel Aviv.

Melamed’s family does not believe the child died or is buried there.

His mother, Shulamit Melamed, now in her 90s, believes instead that her son was kidnapped and adopted and is still alive today.

She has not been told about the exhumation, due to concerns it could have a negative impact on her health.

“Mom didn’t feel that he was dead from the beginning. The fact that they buried him so quickly was suspicious to her,” Ruti Sharabi, Yosef’s sister, told the Ynet news site.

“My brother had green eyes and he was fair-skinned — he didn’t look like a Yemenite boy,” she said. “If the grave is empty we will start questioning where he is, but at least we’ll know he’s alive.”

Yosef’s sister, Vered Driham, told the Walla news site that no matter the outcome of the exhumation, there will still be unanswered questions.

“Any answer we get will feel insufficient — if there are no bones, then where is Yossi?” she said.

Family members watch as the forensic team opens the grave of Yosef Melamed at Nahalat Yitzhak Cemetery on July 27, 2022 (Avshalom Sassoni/Flash90)

The families of those whose graves are next to Melamed’s accepted a request by lawyers representing the Melamed family and agreed that if their relatives’ bodies are discovered in the same location as the baby, they will be DNA tested too.

Yosef was born to Shalom and Shulamit…