'In the wake' of war on Hamas: Israel is ensuring its dead soldiers, civilians will become fathers

In a bid to save their bloodlines, sperms of over 39 Israeli men who died in the war against Hamas since October 7 have been extracted and preserved for future fertilisation, the Knesset’s Health Committee said Wednesday. According to the Health Ministry’s updated rules, spouses and parents of deceased men can request to have their sperm harvested. Although the procedure of extracting sperm is the most effective within 24 hours of death, but is possible even after several days of death. Since Hamas launched its all-out offensive against Israel last month, embryologists and IVF specialists in Israel have reported a surge of requests from families and spouses of deceased men – soldiers and civilians – asking them to perform immediate posthumous sperm retrieval (PSR). According to a report by the Times of Israel, an embryologist at Kaplan Medical Center in Rehovot, Dr Yael Harir, said that while her medical facility performs only a few PSR procedures in a year, the requests for sperm extraction have gone up considerably since October. “When you have to do this procedure on corpses, the staff finds it difficult physically and emotionally,” she said. “There is no protocol for coping with the preservation of sperm in such a large scope. We had to figure out how to cope with the situation and assess what equipment we had to do so many procedures in parallel,” she added. Israel-Hamas war update Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Wednesday claimed to have very specific intel on Hamas wares and command structures inside the Al Shifa hospital that has become a global flashpoint. While the IDF claimed to be carrying out “precise and targeted” attack on Hamas inside the hospital, a security official added the operation inside the medical facility could be widened further since the Israeli military knows exactly what it is going to find inside. “We are starting small, and the operation will expand as necessary. The entry of troops into Al-Shifa is more of a challenge for media [optics] than operations,” Times of Israel quoted the unnamed military official as having said.