Hana al-Za'anin conceived al-Hassan using sperm smuggled out of an Israeli jail where her husband is serving a 12-year sentence. Photograph: Suhaib Salem/Reuters
The wife of a Palestinian prisoner in an Israeli jail gave birth on Friday to a boy born from sperm smuggled into Gaza, her family said, the first successful pregnancy of its kind in the embattled coastal enclave.
The procedure follows several similar cases last year in the West Bank, and Palestinians view such births as an act of defiance against Israel's jail policies.
"I am tired and very, very happy," said mother Hana al-Za'anin, hours after baby al-Hassan was delivered. Speaking from a hospital bed in Gaza City, she told Reuters that Israel had banned her from visiting her husband since 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.
Gaza has been run by the Islamist group Hamas since 2007. Israel has enforced a blockade on the territory and has fought two wars in the territory since the party took control.
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 about six hours.
Her husband, 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.
Israel regards 5,000 or so Palestinian prisoners in its jails, many imprisoned for killing civilians, as terrorists.
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