Palestinian prisoner's wife gives birth to twins

The wife of a Palestinian prisoner from Gaza gave birth to twins on Monday having conceived using sperm smuggled from her husband’s Israeli prison cell, Aljazeera.net has reported. Ahmad Al-Sakani, 35, and his wife Umm Tariq have named the twins Mutaz and Siwar. Al-Sakani was arrested by the Israeli occupation authorities in 2002 and sentenced to 27 years in prison.

A spokesman for Waed Association for Prisoners’ Affairs, Abdullah Qandeel, said that around 50 children have been born after sperm has been smuggled from their fathers in jail and used to inseminate the prisoners’ wives. According to Umm Tariq, the twins’ birth is a “victory message” sent from the prisoners.

A number of Muslim scholars have issued legal opinions which allow wives to be inseminated by sperm smuggled from their husbands who are serving lengthy prison sentences. However, they stressed that strict conditions must be applied to ensure the credibility of the sperm’s source.

The first reported such birth took place in 2012, when Dalal Al-Zein had a baby using sperm smuggled from her husband, who had at the time been in jail for 15 years.

Palestinian prisoners are denied conjugal visits by the Israeli Prison Service. More than 5,000 Palestinians are currently being held in Israel’s prisons, many of them without charge or trial under a system known as “administrative detention”.