A week after his release from the prisons of the Israeli occupation, the Palestinian Salah Hussein and his companion coach Sherine Nazal still receive the well-wishers freely and then meet with their child "Ali" and embrace him for the first time, then their wedding ceremony, which was delayed 18 years.
At the Tarqumiya checkpoint, south of Hebron, in the West Bank, the five-year-old boy ran, calling "Baba, I'm Ali .. I am Ali," to show him his father in their first meeting after the father's release from a prison sentence that lasted 15 and a half years. "This is Daddy, Mama," the mother said, urging him to hug his father.
Ali was born from a sperm smuggled to his father from the occupation prisons in 2015 after years of remarrying his parents remotely, and he was able to embrace his father for the first time before the occupation re-arrested him at the Container checkpoint north of Bethlehem, then he was taken to investigate the Al-Maskubiya Center in Jerusalem and then release him At night near Ramallah.
Mother Sherine Nazzal said: "My biggest concern was to fear my child from this moment, but he took the initiative to call his father ... We used to talk to him every day and follow his pictures and stories, and in the last year he was postponing his games and learning to swim until his father went out to share with them."
Arrest .. and remote marriage
The story of Salah Hussein (48 years), from Beit Duqo, Quds District, and Sherine Nazzal (41 years), from the city of Qalqilya in the northern West Bank, started in 2002. When they got acquainted during their university studies, he submitted to her engagement to her family, but his pursuit of the occupation forces prevented the completion of their association. In 2004 the young man was arrested on charges of engaging in a military organization affiliated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and sentenced to 15 years' imprisonment.
In 2008 Salah and Shireen decided to officially link and tie the knot with an official agency that the Red Cross carried from the captive groom, and the occupation allowed her to visit him four years later.
In 2015, Salah said that he had the opportunity to have children remotely, and Sherine actually underwent an IVF after which they gave birth to their baby in November 2015.
Ambassadors of Freedom
Ali is one of about 80 Palestinian children who were born from the sperm of their captive fathers after being smuggled out of the Israeli occupation prisons, and in Palestinian circles they are called "ambassadors of freedom." But the different event in his story is that he was able to attend his parents' wedding late 18 years.
Sherine said that after years of her engagement with an official marriage contract, she found no social or religious objection to using a "liberated" sperm from her arrested husband to have a child. The goal was for the prisoner to take an advanced step towards fatherhood and be a mother, so they decided to have children before being released.
Hours after his release, Shereen wore a garment of embroidered Palestinian heritage to celebrate the release and in preparation for her wedding to him, but she remembered the attempts to assassinate Salah while he was being chased. She said, "I lived a feeling of losing it several times ... but today I falsify him with his son Ali." "Whatever the ruling is high and injustice higher, the sun of freedom will shine."
Salah was sitting on his son's lap, next to his mother, whose suffering began with the arrest of all her children since the early eighties, not the last of them Salah, where her son Musa is still detained in the occupation prisons. Near them, a large banner holding Salah's picture hung with his father, who left a year ago, saying, "Every artery in the body of the Liberals will win."
A struggle for freedom
Salah was shot by the occupation forces the moment of his arrest in 2004, and to this day he needs the support of someone when walking sometimes. In the first year of his detention, he was transferred between the hospital and the investigation centers, he said.
He mentions about his long years of detention that they have different levels of difficulty, but the loss of freedom is always the most difficult feeling. "Families are one battle, and in the aggregate a struggle for freedom."
Salah did not forget his wife in every detail of his detention, but rather believed that her steadfastness was no less than his suffering in captivity. "She was in more stressful conditions. She had the scientific capabilities that enabled her to be at the best and most comfortable social level, but her national awareness gave her the ability to withstand 15 years and more."
Sherine herself lived through the experience of waiting for her brother Raed Nazzal, who was detained in the occupation prisons for many years before being released and citing Israeli bullets in 2002. Her husband says, "This created a solid woman with the ability to withstand, especially in the face of social pressure from marriage and childbearing from a distance."
Salah says about the experience of their marriage and childbearing, "Age has come to us and I have years to finish my ruling, so we decided to marry and have children with contraband," and the husband thought that with his wife, they would gain time before age.
At the beginning of the birth of "Ali", the occupation authorities punished the prisoners who smuggled their semen by depriving them of their visit, and he was unable to meet with his child, but later, Salah decided not to bring the minor to the prison window. "I said it is sufficient that we forced him to come to a difficult life without a father at the beginning of his life. At least, to provide him with the condition of psychological stability, away from the pressure of the experience of getting to know me from the window of the visit."
The father and his child at the wedding
Salah found "relatively acceptable" as he called him from his child after his release, but he believed that he would "connect him with his heart that beats in love and tenderness to him in a steady flow," he said.
With his mixed joy with the feeling that thousands of prisoners will remain deprived of the embrace of their children and their families, Salah says, "Of course I encourage those who find a life partner who can bear the endurance, to establish their family without waiting for release." But he adds, "The issue is not simple, it is a real suffering that the mother alone can bear education. Child and to deprive the father of seeing his child. "
Nevertheless, Salah remembers, "On the day of his birth, I felt that I had won a victory over the darkness and the impossible ... We were not together, and I was a prisoner, and I became a father."
On his wedding, the father and his child wore two identical black suits with a red tie, and they received well-wishers before they headed in a decorated car to take the "mother" bride to the wedding hall. "Today, I am just worried about getting my detention back and depriving me of my family and my child," the father said.