Amir Cohen / Reuters

Members of the media photograph the remains of a rocket, displayed by Israeli explosives experts, at Kibbutz Zikim near Ashkelon on Tuesday.

JERUSALEM -- A rocket exploded in southern Israel on Tuesday in the first such attack by militants in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip since a truce ended a week of cross-border fighting in November, Israeli police said.

The rocket caused some damage to a road near the city of Ashkelon but no injuries, police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said.

"An explosion was heard in the Ashkelon region experts searched areas experts and found one rocket that struck, damaging a road but causing no injuries," Rosenfeld said.

Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a militant group in Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' West Bank-based Fatah movement, called the rocket a "first response" to inmate Arafat Jaradat's death in disputed circumstances on Saturday. 

"We must resist our enemy by all available means," the group said in a statement emailed to reporters. "We stress our commitment to armed struggle against the Zionist enemy."

Hamas said it was investigating the attack, which followed a surge in West Bank protests since Jaradat's death and intermittent hunger strikes by four other prisoners.

In the latest violence there, Israeli troops shot and wounded five Palestinians during confrontations with protesters in the Bethlehem area on Monday and a 15-year-old boy was in critical condition.

The death in disputed circumstances of Arafat Jaradat, buried in a funeral in the Hebron area attended by thousands on Monday, and a hunger strike by four other Palestinian inmates, have stoked tensions ahead of a planned visit next month by U.S. President Barack Obama.

Related: Christians, Muslims pray to halt Israeli security wall

TEL AVIV, Israel -- It is surely among the strangest jail break stories ever conceived: a daring escapade in which a determined band of young women beat one of the toughest security regimes in the world.

They are the wives of Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails – without the right to conjugal visits – who nevertheless claim to have become pregnant by their husbands.

This isn’t a case of the usual contraband sneaked into a jail to make life a little easier for inmates. It’s what is smuggled out that matters – the stuff of life itself.

Plenty think the plot is far-fetched, but the women insist that armed with little more than cunning and a concealed container, they can ensure that no wall or coil of barbed wire is a barrier to parenthood.

Faridah Ma’arouf laughed as she recalled hurrying out of the prison gates after visiting day was done, hiding a sample of her son’s sperm.

“We had a taxi waiting to take us very fast,’’ she said. “I thought I had to get it to the doctor quickly.’’

It seems to have been a successful operation. Three months later Ma’arouf sat in an IVF clinic where the progress of her daughter-in-law’s pregnancy was being monitored.

It is what could be described as the brainchild of Dr. Salim Abu Khaizaran, head of the Razan Center for Infertility in the Palestinian city of Ramallah on the West Bank.

“We are doing this to help these ladies because we feel as doctors that the wives of prisoners pay a very high price,” Abu Khaizaran said without revealing how many other such procedures he had conducted. “She has to wait for her husband, sometimes she can spend her lovely youth just waiting. And by the time her husband is out, many of them will not be able to have babies.”

NBC News

Faridah Ma'arouf says she smuggled a sample of her son's sperm out of Ofer Prison, above, so that her daughter-in-law could become pregnant.

He added: “The wives lose out twice because the community then pressurizes the husband to marry another woman in order to fulfill his requirements to become a father, which ... I feel is very sad.”

'What are you waiting for?'
Many of the men are serving long sentences for terrorist offenses.

Ammar Al-Zibben has been in prison for 16 years. He is serving 27 life sentences with an additional 25 years for plotting bomb attacks in Jerusalem that killed 21 people.

He is also the recent father of a baby boy, named Mohannad, who is just seven months old.

His wife, Dalal, 32, said the idea to go for IVF was originally her husband’s. The suggestion took her by surprise. She had expected opposition from family and friends in their conservative community.

“I was very surprised when I found them encouraging me enthusiastically,” she said. “Everyone said I should do it and not deny myself and my husband our basic right, to have a family.

“It reached a point where people would stop me in the street and ask me why I still hadn’t done it,” she added. “They would say to me, ‘What are you waiting for? Why are you wasting time?’”

Her husband got to see his son for the first time six months ago.

“The meeting was happy, sad, exciting. It was mixed with a lot of feelings and tears, I can’t describe to you how we both felt,’’ she said.

“I had sacrificed everything when my husband was arrested,” she said. “Now I have been given this opportunity to make my dreams come true, to have the family I always wanted. We will be waiting for my husband to come out and join us.’’

Near-miraculous conceptions
As word spread, the number of prisoners’ wives waiting for the clinic to make their dreams come true has risen, hospital officials said.

Alaa Badarneh / EPA, file

Dalal Rabaya holds her son Mohannad at a hospital in the West Bank town of Nablus on Aug. 13.

They all face the same, daunting obstacle. Typically a prisoner visitor will pass through an airport style scanner, a body search, and then be asked to leave all their possessions in a locker before they get to see their relative. And then they will be separated by glass and speak only by phone.

According to the Israel Prison Service these are near-miraculous conceptions.

“Due to technological and security restrictions that apply to prisoners in their relationship with family members, one can question the ability to smuggle as claimed,’’ Sivan Weizman, spokeswoman for the Prison Authority, said dryly.

If Abu Khaizaran has any idea how samples get from prison cell to fertility clinic, he’s not telling. But the hospital insists on the written word of two close family members that the sperm is indeed that of the husband, he said.

A black-and-white screen showed the outline of a baby in the womb. The loud and rapid beat of its heart reverberated in the fertility clinic’s small ultrasound room.

“This is the head of the baby. And there’s its hand. He’s moving. It’s a boy. Fifteen weeks,” Abu Khaizaran told mother-to-be Lidya Al-Rimawi who had come in for her first scan. “Everything looks fine.’’

Like all the women NBC interviewed, Al-Rimawi was coy when asked how she managed to evade Israeli prison guards and their searches.

“We found much difficulty. But despite the security checks we got through, thanks to God,” she said.

“Each case is different from another,’’ she said when pressed for more detail. “We smuggled it out in a bag, a small nylon bag. But it is difficult to explain how.”

“If I told you the way we smuggled it, definitely the army will prevent it from happening and there are prisoners we don’t want to deprive of this same chance.’’

She beamed as she looked at the image of the fast-growing baby inside her.

“It is a very beautiful feeling,’’ she said. “It is a feeling that cannot be described. It is a miracle.’’

Ronen Zvulun / Reuters

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signed his first coalition partner in centrist Tzipi Livni, a move that could get a nod of approval from peace activists and U.S. President Barack Obama. But how cohesive any message of peace will be depends largely on the makeup of the rest of the coalition.

News analysis

TEL AVIV -- In the Middle Eastern bazaar, the first sale of the day is prized beyond any other. It is called the “siftach,” and to clinch the deal the seller gives a discount to the buyer, to launch a good day’s business.

In the case of the agreement announced Wednesday between Likud Beitenu leader Benjamin Netanyahu and Tzipi Livni, leader of  “Hatnua” (Movement) to join a coalition government, Netanyahu was desperate to get one of the several political parties he is negotiating with to be the first to reach agreement.

So to entice Livni to sign, he sweetened his offer to include what Livni dearly wanted: the role of chief peace negotiator with the Palestinians, in addition to the guarantee of the post of justice minister for her and the post of minister of the environment for another member of her party.

Her brief in a new Netanyahu government, then, would be to launch a new peace process with the Palestinians, according to the published agreement, “with the aim of reaching a settlement with them that will put an end to the conflict.”

The significance of this is that the responsibility passes from the foreign minister, who loudly proclaimed that he did not believe in peace with the Palestinians, to Livni, who does.

In addition to being the first step toward forming Netanyahu’s third government, it allows him to send a signal to U.S. President Barack Obama, expected in Israel on his first state visit next month, that he is serious about moving toward peace and that Obama should support him; Netanyahu’s relationship with Obama is famously fraught.

What this means in practice, however, is far from clear. It depends on who else joins Netanyahu and Livni in building a coalition government. Pundits expect Netanyahu to focus his attention next on the Labor party, as well as a couple of the religious Jewish parties, and only then to go for broke -- to offer a role to the two young newcomers, one on the left and one on the right, who have surprisingly found common cause.

The question: Can Netanyau pull off a brilliant ploy and form a government without the second- and third-largest parties, Yair Lapid’s ‘Yesh Atid’ (There is a Future) and Naftali Bennett’s Bait Hayehudi (Jewish Home)?

Or is it so brilliant? When the voters speak clearly and give the second- and third-largest number of votes to two new parties with new leaders and a large majority of new members of parliament, shouldn’t this call for change be reflected in any new government?

The problem is, and this brings us back to Livni’s role as peace negotiator, Bennett and Lapid, who agree on many social and economic issues, could not be further apart on the central question: What about the Palestinians? Bennett is absolutely clear: No Palestinian state. Lapid is with Livni.

So is there a real change in the Israeli government’s position vis a vis peace talks? As always, Netanyahu is hard to read. Does he really want Livni to take Israel down the road to compromise and peace? Or does he just want to form a new government so badly that he will offer any enticement to make it happen?

Cynics argue the latter. Some others believe that maybe a miracle is at hand.

And as Israel’s first president, David Ben Gurion, once said: To be a pragmatist in Israel, you have to believe in miracles.

Martin Fletcher is the author of "The List," "Breaking News" and "Walking Israel."

Related:

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UN panel: Israel must withdraw all settlers from the West Bank

Surprisingly centrist vote has Netanyahu reaching to the left

This story was originally published on Thu Feb 21, 2013 4:42 AM EST

Abed Al Hashlamoun / EPA

An Israeli soldier covers a small video camera that a Palestinian man was using to film a clash in El Aroub, in the southern West Bank, on Wednesday. Israeli soldiers were reportedly attacked with rocks and molotov cocktails, and responded using "crowd control" methods. Lubna Hanash, a Palestinian woman, was killed when shot in the head with live ammunition.

RAMALLAH, West Bank - Israel is breaking its own rules of engagement by using deadly force to disperse unarmed Palestinian protesters in the occupied West Bank, the Israeli rights group B'Tselem reported on Monday.

Israeli forces have killed 56 people since 2005 in clashes with rock-throwing Palestinians, said B'Tselem, which accused the military of having "extensively and systematically violated" rules barring deadly retaliation for non-lethal assault.

"The Israeli military's standing orders explicitly state that live ammunition may not be fired at stone-throwers," it said.

In the past two weeks, Israeli forces have shot dead two Palestinians in unrest that Israeli officials said may foreshadow a third Palestinian uprising. Peace talks have been frozen since 2010 and Palestinian anger is running high against expanding Jewish settlement in the West Bank, captured along with East Jerusalem, Gaza and the Golan Heights in a 1967 war.

'Biased narrative'
The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) said the B'Tselem report "presents a biased narrative, relying primarily on incidents that are either old or still under investigation by the Military Police."

"The IDF does everything in its power to ensure that the use of riot dispersal means is done in accordance with the rules of engagement," the IDF said in a written response sent to Reuters.

Bernat Armangue / AP

Relatives and friends of Palestinian Lubna Hanash, who Israeli soldiers shot and killed, mourn during her funeral in the West Bank town of Bethlehem on Wednesday. The Israeli military said soldiers were attacked with firebombs and fired back. Hanash was driving in a car when she was shot.

Of the Palestinian fatalities since 2005, six were killed by rubber-coated metal bullets and two by teargas canisters, both supposedly non-lethal weapons which were fired directly at protesters, B'Tselem said.

"In practice, members of the security forces make almost routine use of these weapons in unlawful, dangerous ways, and the relevant Israeli authorities do too little to prevent the recurrence of this conduct," the report said.

The other 48 protesters killed where hit by live ammunition, according to the group.

The protests come as sanctions imposed by Israel after Palestinians won de facto statehood recognition at the United Nations have crippled the Palestinian government in the West Bank and deepened economic malaise.

Faced with the threat of a general strike by the government workers union, top Palestinian officials have encouraged protesters to direct their anger against Israel instead.

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Reuters journalists: Israel troops assaulted us, forced us to strip in street

Pilgrims and locals celebrated Christmas Day on Tuesday in the ancient Bethlehem church where tradition holds Jesus was born, candles illuminating the sacred site and the joyous sound of prayer filling its overflowing halls.

Overcast skies and a cold wind didn't dampen the spirits of worshippers who came dressed in holiday finery and the traditional attire of foreign lands to mark the holy day in this biblical West Bank town. Bells pealed and long lines formed inside the fourth-century Church of the Nativity complex as Christian faithful waited eagerly to see the grotto that is Jesus' traditional birthplace.

Duncan Hardock, 24, a writer from MacLean, Va., traveled to Bethlehem from the republic of Georgia, where he had been teaching English. After passing through the separation barrier Israel built to ward off West Bank attackers, he walked to Bethlehem's Manger Square where the church stands.

"I feel we got to see both sides of Bethlehem in a really short period of time," Hardock said. "On our walk from the wall, we got to see the lonesome, closed side of Bethlehem ... But the moment we got into town, we're suddenly in the middle of the party."

Bethlehem lies 6 miles south of Jerusalem. Entry to the city is controlled by Israel, which occupied the West Bank in 1967.

Hardock's girlfriend, 22-year-old Jennifer Gemmell of Longmont, Colorado, compared the festive spirit in Manger Square on Christmas Eve, saying "it's like being at Times Square at New Year's."

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The cavernous church was unable to hold all the worshippers who had hoped to celebrate Christmas Day Mass inside. A loudspeaker outside the church broadcast the service to the hundreds in the square who could not pack inside.

Slideshow: Christmas around the world

Paul J. Richards / AFP - Getty Images

In churches and bus stations, on water skis and bicycles, people from the Middle East to middle America celebrate Christmas.

Launch slideshow

Pope's prayer for peace
Tourists in the square posed for pictures as vendors hawked olive wood rosaries, nativity scenes, corn on the cob, roasted nuts, tea and coffee.

An official from the Palestinian tourism ministry predicted 10,000 foreigners would visit Bethlehem on Christmas Day and said 15,000 visited on Christmas Eve — up 20 percent from a year earlier. The official, Rula Maia'a, attributed the rise in part to the Church of the Nativity's classification earlier this year as a U.N. World Heritage Site.

Christians from Israel — Arab citizens and others — also boosted the number of visitors.

Germany's latest big export: Christmas markets

On Christmas Eve, thousands of Christians from all over the world packed the square, which was awash in light, resplendent with decorations and adorned by a lavishly decorated, 55-foot fir tree. Their Palestinian hosts, who welcome this holiday as the high point of their city's year, were especially joyous this season, proud of the United Nations' recognition of an independent state of Palestine just last month.

On Monday evening, Pope Benedict XVI prayed that Israelis and Palestinians live in peace and freedom, and asked the faithful to pray for strife-torn Syria as well as Lebanon and Iraq.

He urged people to reflect upon what they find time for in their busy, technology-driven lives.

A family's Christmas wish: Healthy heart for girl

"The great moral question of our attitude toward the homeless, toward refugees and migrants takes on a deeper dimension: Do we really have room for God when he seeks to enter under our roof? Do we have time and space for him?" the pope said.

"The faster we can move, the more efficient our time-saving appliances become, the less time we have. And God? The question of God never seems urgent," Benedict lamented.

Later Tuesday, the world's Christmas focus will shift to Vatican City, where the pope will deliver his traditional "Urbi et Orbi" speech — Latin for "to the city and the world" — from the central balcony of St. Peter's Basilica to thousands of pilgrims, tourists and Romans gathered in the piazza below.

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Ammar Awad / Reuters

A worshipper prays in the Church of the Nativity, the site revered as the birthplace of Jesus, ahead of Christmas in the West Bank town of Bethlehem on Dec. 21, 2012.

Jim Hollander / EPA

Pilgrims from Italy join a procession through the Church of the Nativity down into the 'Grotto,' traditionally accepted as the birthplace of Jesus Christ, in the West Bank town of Bethlehem on Dec. 21. The church is one of the oldest in the world and pilgrims, tourists and Christian faithful are flocking to the town where Jesus was born in the lead-up to the Christmas festivities.

Mohamad Torokman / Reuters

Palestinians surround a cart carrying a wooden statue of baby Jesus before a march in the West Bank town of Bethlehem on Dec. 20, 2012.

Slideshow: Holiday season lights up

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HEBRON, West Bank -- Israeli soldiers have been accused of punching two Reuters cameramen and forcing them to strip in the street, before letting off a tear gas canister in front of them, leaving one of them needing hospital treatment.

Israel's military said Thursday it took the allegations seriously. 

"The regional brigade commander was ordered to open an investigation," Israeli Defense Forces spokeswoman Avital Leibovich said in an email.

Yousri Al Jamal and Ma'amoun Wazwaz said a foot patrol stopped them on Wednesday in the heart of Hebron as they were driving to a nearby checkpoint where a Palestinian teenager had just been shot dead by an Israeli border guard.

Their car was clearly marked "TV" and they were both wearing blue flak jackets with "Press" emblazoned on the front.

The soldiers forced them to leave the vehicle and punched them, striking them with the butts of their guns. They accused the journalists of working for an Israeli NGO, B'Tselem, which documents human rights violations in the occupied West Bank, the Reuters cameramen said.

Locals say B'Tselem has given a number of Palestinians video cameras so they can film soldiers and settlers who live in this divided city. The NGO was not immediately available for comment.

The soldiers did not let the men produce their official ID papers and forced them to strip down to their underwear, making them kneel on the road with their hands behind their heads, the cameramen said.

Two other Palestinian journalists working for local news organizations, including a satellite television station affiliated to the Islamist group Hamas, were also stopped and forced to the ground.

One of the soldiers then dropped a tear gas canister between the men and the IDF patrol ran away, according to the cameramen. The four journalists scrambled clear and Jamal and Wazwaz got to their car, which had rapidly filled up with tear gas, they said.

More Israel coverage from NBC News

They tried to drive away, but said they only got around 200 meters before they had to stop and exit the vehicle because of the gas. The soldiers then fired more tear gas in their direction, the cameramen said.

Wazwaz was overcome by the fumes and was taken to hospital by ambulance. He was released later the same night.

'Mistreatment'
The Israeli soldiers allegedly took two gas masks and a video camera from their car. The undamaged camera was later found abandoned further up the road, according to the Reuters journalists.

"We deplore the mistreatment of our journalists and have registered our extreme dismay with the Israeli military authorities," said Stephen J. Adler, editor-in-chief of Reuters News.

Paul Danahar, the chairman of the Foreign Press Association in Israel, said on Twitter that the organization would soon issue a statement on the attack.

There “must be a limit (on) how many times (the) IDF can say this stuff is usual behavior,” he wrote.

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Tensions have been running particularly high in Hebron in the past week following repeated clashes between stone-throwing youths and soldiers.

Muhammad al-Salameh, 17, was shot dead close to his house in the heart of Hebron on Wednesday evening after an altercation with border guards at a nearby checkpoint. Israeli police said he had brandished a gun, which later proved to be a toy gun.

Some 800 Jewish settlers live among 30,000 Palestinians in the parts of the old city that are under Israeli control.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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