Chandigarh: The human sperm, which has played an implausible role in the lives of conflicted Israelis and Palestinians over the past two decades, is continuing to enact its phantastic, albeit shadowy presence in the ongoing urban war in Gaza.
In an extraordinary real-life iteration of events, which till recently were limited exclusively to the realm of cinema, Israel’s health ministry is implementing an efficient posthumous sperm retrieval (PSR) programme, aimed at harvesting the sperm of deceased young males, particularly soldiers killed in battle.
The objective of extracting and freezing this sperm is for its eventual use in fathering children to perpetuate the deceased’s genetic legacy.
According to Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, the PSR programme had, till November 9, been carried out on 33 men killed in Hamas’s cross-border raid on October 7, of which 29 were soldiers and the remaining four were civilians.
The paper reported that the number of PSRs was rising but did not elaborate.
Alongside this, other news reports, including one from Bloomberg, stated that hundreds of Israeli women were volunteering not only to carry the embryo from the dead men’s sperm via invitro fertilisation (IVF), but also to mother children born thereafter.
Many countries have outlawed PSR, but in Israel it is largely the parents, and not so much the widows, of the deceased young men who are fighting for their right to have grandchildren, a move which Bloomberg reported was triggering ‘raised eyebrows’.
The news service quoted Gil Siegal, head of Israel’s Centre for Medical Law, Bioethics and Health Policy, as saying that it was in a child’s best interests to be born to living parents, and not in a state of “planned orphanhood”.
Moreover, the discourse around fertility and birth must “begin with mother-father-child, not grandmother-grandfather-child”, he added.
Other analysts, however, claimed that PSR was an undertaking aimed at spawning offspring who Siegal referred to as “living monuments”.
Meanwhile, almost all requests for PSR after last month’s Hamas attack had resulted in the Israeli health ministry’s legal adviser handing down a temporary order, by-passing the need for court approval to reap the deceased’s young men’s sperm, reported Haaretz.
PSR was first approved in Israel in 2003 via ‘instructions’ from the country’s attorney general who, at the time, had declared that “procreation [was] an important and substantive issue in Israeli society” to which considerable emotional and financial resources were devoted.
Israel also adhered to “sociocultural values” that promoted procreation even in the toughest circumstances, Haaretz declared, but had passed no definitive legislation as yet regarding PSR.
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Hence, when the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) informed a family about the death of their son in action, they also offered them the option of sperm preservation. Furthermore, the IDF helped the bereaved family contact the relevant parties for performing PSR as long as it was medically possible.
According to experts, the best chance of finding living sperm is within 24 hours of death, after which it is difficult to retrieve, and virtually impossible to collect after a 72-hour hiatus. Searing local temperatures too adversely impact dead bodies in this regard.
“The subject [of PSR] raises complex and ethical and legal questions … as well as [the issue of its] psychological effects on the bereaved family and the bereaved family’s relationship with the spouse,” Haaretz said.
Further complications, it said, centred on the proposed mother never having met the sperm donor, which, in turn, raised further questions regarding the legal and inheritance rights of the ensuing child or children.
The issue of 18 or 20-year-old IDF conscripts who died in battle or conflict also necessitated further deliberation, as their sperm would be inseminated into a unknown volunteer, initiating not only legal, but also psychological and emotional complications for all concerned.
Jailed Palestinians, too, look for ways to conceive
Meanwhile, Palestinians interned in Israeli jails, often for years at a time, were also locked in a partially successful effort at smuggling out their sperm to their spouses in Gaza to impregnate them via IVF.
And though there is no publicly available data on how many Palestinian couples had conceived in this manner, as it was a covert activity strictly monitored – and banned – by Israel, anecdotal accounts put their number at ‘a few score’ over the past decade.
The Washington-based Al-Monitor news website, however, claims that 96 Palestinian children had been born via this clandestine process since the first such baby was conceived from smuggled sperm in 2012.
All 96 of them, it stated, had been dubbed “ambassadors of freedom”, as for Palestinians these teenagers were symbols of resistance, however meagre, against Israel in their enduring seven-decade long struggle for a homeland.
But the success rate of these surreptitious endeavours for Palestinians was highly restricted, compared to efficient Israeli PSR practices and follow-on storage processes, as live sperm had a limited life-span of up to 12 hours, after which it needed to be frozen to render it suitable for IVF.
Consequently, its furtive journey from Israeli jails to Gaza in an assortment of ampules like vials, fountain pens, candy wrappers, chocolate bars and even the tips of rubber gloves stuffed with date paste, was invariably arduous, time consuming and predisposed to failure at every step of the way.
This included running the time-consuming gauntlet of Israeli checkpoints into Gaza, followed eventually by sperm fertilisation, all of which added up to an abysmally low birth rate for potential Palestinian ‘freedom ambassadors’.
Palestinian spouses encountered yet another obstacle before undergoing IVF – inherent Muslim conservatism and practices required the doctor performing the procedure to have two members from the jailed husband’s family and an equal number from his wife’s to formally testify that the sperm was indeed ‘genuine’.
Alongside this, the concerned spouse was advised to advertise her impending pregnancy, as this helped avoid local gossip and insinuations suggesting infidelity.
At the end of June 2023, the Israel Prison Service was holding 4,499 Palestinians in detention according to the Israeli Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories. The issue of prisoners was central to Palestinian society, which considered them freedom fighters resisting Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and near-constant blockade of the Gaza Strip.
Prisoners’ families were thus revered, receiving financial support from the Palestinian Authority.
In January 2022, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) documented the instance of a woman named Farhana successfully smuggling out a phial containing her Palestinian husband Hossam Al Attar’s semen from an Israeli jail, where he was serving out an 18-year sentence, till 2026.
After a series of setbacks, Farhana conceived and gave birth to her daughter Jannat – meaning heaven in Arabic – in 2014, amidst bombardment from Israeli combat aircraft during the 50-day long Operation Protective Edge’s siege of the Gaza Strip, in which over 2,000 Palestinians were killed.
“It was worth waiting all this time,” she told ABC. “The Palestinians in Gaza are very pleased with this idea of smuggling sperm.”
