Iris Haim, the mother of Yotam Haim, an Israeli hostage mistakenly killed by IDF troops after escaping Hamas captivity in Gaza, said that she has a sense of “hope and renewal” from an April 10 decision by the Beersheba family court to allow the family to use his sperm to conceive a child via a surrogate.

“I’m proud of the State of Israel for taking this important step forward,” Haim told The Times of Israel.

This is the second case of a parent being allowed to use their child’s sperm to have a grandchild through surrogacy.

Last July, an Eilat court authorized Sharon Eisenkot to use sperm retrieved from her son, IDF soldier Maor Eisenkot, who was killed in Gaza in 2023. That was the first such decision since the outbreak of the war.

In the days following October 7, 2023, when Hamas-led terrorists invaded southern Israel, slaughtering some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking 251 hostages, embryologists and specialists reported an unprecedented number of requests for postmortem sperm retrieval.

While only two families have been granted permission to proceed with conception, postmortem sperm retrieval has been performed on 253 soldiers and security forces personnel as of April 1. Of those, 82 percent were at the request of a parent, according to Prof. Bella Savitsky, an epidemiologist and public health specialist at Ashkelon Academic College, who has studied the issue.

She said that sperm was also retrieved from 21 civilians, with almost half of those requests coming from parents.

Before October 7, posthumous sperm retrieval was permitted for the parents only with court approval. After the start of the war, the Health Ministry and the Justice Ministry approved a temporary regulation allowing parents to authorize sperm retrieval without the need for court approval.

“October 7, 2023, changed our country’s perspective,” Haim said. “There’s been so much death, so many young people’s lives who have been robbed.”

The ruling has “opened new doors for us,” she said. “Creating new life is a way to deal with events that would otherwise be impossible to bear.”

Creating new life is a way to deal with events that would otherwise be impossible to bear

Creating new life is a way to deal with events that would otherwise be impossible to........

© The Times of Israel