Palestinian prisoner's wife who was impregnated after her husband’s sperm was smuggled out of prison gives birth to a boy

• Prisoner's wife gives birth after being inseminated with 'smuggled sperm'
• The bodily fluid was smuggled out of an Israeli prison and into Gaza
• 'Smuggled sperm' has seen total of six pregnancies on the West Bank

'Today a hero was born to a hero,' said Tamer's brother as new mother Hana lies in hospital surrounded by photographs of her husband who was jailed for being a member of the Islamic Jihad militant group

The wife of a Palestinian imprisoned in Israel has given birth to a boy conceived after her husband's sperm was smuggled into Gaza, her family said.

Hana al-Za'anin delivered baby al-Hassan after she was successfully inseminated - the first time such a procedure has been successful in Gaza - after six similar pregnancies in the West Bank.

Many political prisoners in Israel are denied conjugal visits, and Palestinians view such births as an act of defiance against jail policies.

‘I am tired and very, very happy,’ said new mother Hana al-Za'anin said after the birth.

Speaking from a hospital bed in Gaza City, she said Israel banned her from visiting her husband Tamer upon his arrest in 2006, citing unspecified ‘security reasons.’

Most of Gaza's 1.8 million people are barred from entering Israel for the same reason, although it allows some merchants and seriously ill people to enter its territory from Gaza.

Gaza has been run by the Islamist group Hamas since 2007. Israel has enforced a blockade on the territory and has fought a round of bloody battles with the militant party.

Al-Za'anin declined to say how the sperm was conveyed out of prison, but said its journey to a medical lab in Gaza, where two specialists were waiting for it, took around six hours.

Tamer was arrested in an Israeli army incursion into the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun and jailed for 12 years for belonging to the Islamic Jihad militant group.

‘Today a hero was born to a hero,’ the prisoner's 22-year-old brother Tareq, a hairdresser, said with a laugh.

Israel regards 5,000 or so Palestinian prisoners in its jails, many imprisoned for killing civilians, as terrorists.

The insemination of prisoners' wives led to six pregnancies in the occupied West Bank in 2013, as clinics have become more advanced, community awareness has increased and religious clerics are blessing the practice.

‘750,000 Palestinians have been arrested by Israel since 1967 - many serve long sentences,’ said Doctor Salem Abu Khaizaran of the Razan Medical Center in Nablus, a West Bank facility that aided the pregnancies.

‘The families suffer, and our services provide a way out.’

Palestinians say their prisoners are fighters in a political struggle and deserve more protection under international law.

They are rankled by the Israeli government's decision in 2006 to allow the Israeli assassin of former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to conceive a son through conjugal visits.

Source - Dailymail