Hundreds of Israeli ultra-Orthodox Jews protested on Tuesday to voice their religious objections to planned autopsies of two babies who died in an incident at an unlicensed nursery in Jerusalem a day earlier. Israeli doctors declared the babies dead after medics evacuated 55 children from the daycare centre in an area of Jerusalem inhabited by members of the ultra-Orthodox community, though they have not yet specified a cause of death.
Israeli media reported that the incident could have been connected to the daycare’s heating system, suggesting heat exhaustion and dehydration as possible causes. A supreme court ruling reportedly issued Tuesday afternoon appears to have blocked the post-mortems, but not before unruly protest scenes broke out on Tuesday in Jerusalem and other Israeli cities, according to police.